The Government of Spain has invested three million euros, public money, in restoring a Masonic temple in Santa Cruz de Tenerife. The building, formerly the headquarters of the Logia Azaña, will be reopened as a museum with institutional honors and speeches exalting the “values of Freemasonry”.
The property was built in the early 20th century to house the meetings and rituals of the Logia Azaña. After the Civil War, it was seized by the State, first used by the Falange Española and later as a warehouse for the Farmacia Militar.
In 2001, the Ayuntamiento de Santa Cruz de Tenerife acquired the building and, after decades of abandonment, in 2022 the restoration works began, financed with state funds.
The public exaltation of the incompatible
The minister Ángel Víctor Torres, responsible for Territorial Policies and Democratic Memory, celebrated that public funds have served to “recover the memory of Freemasonry and its defense of equality, democracy, and secular education.” Words that, far from neutrality, exhibit a political intention: to contrast the Christian faith—and its heritage in public life—with the laicist and esoteric creed that has historically combated the Church.
The mayor of Santa Cruz, José Manuel Bermúdez, referred to the temple as “a light that should never have been extinguished.” In reality, that “light” was repeatedly condemned by the Church precisely because it opposes the true Light, Christ. What is presented as a symbol of progress and freedom is nothing but the rehabilitation of an anti-Christian ideology dressed in patrimonial aesthetics.
The Church’s warning
Freemasonry, let us remember, was born as a political and cultural force openly hostile to the Church, promoter of relativism, secularization, and the moral dissolution of Christian society.
The Church’s stance on Freemasonry admits no ambiguities. In 2023, the Dicasterio para la Doctrina de la Fe reiterated that “active membership in Freemasonry is prohibited” due to its irreconcilable incompatibility with the Catholic faith. And the Código de Derecho Canónico, in its canon 1374, establishes penalties for those who join or promote associations that “plot against the Church”.
The false neutrality of a secular State
The restoration of the Masonic temple in Tenerife is not an innocent act of patrimonial conservation, but a symptom of the spiritual disorientation of a nation that has lost consciousness of its Christian identity. Spain, which for centuries built cathedrals, monasteries, and universities in service of men, but from the transcendence of faith, today invests public resources in recovering a symbol of opposition to the Church attempting to rescue the memory in the name of democracy.
What is presented as “democratic memory” is, in reality, the selective memory of an ideology that seeks to replace faith with the worship of man. Freemasonry has historically been the laboratory where the values of moral relativism, militant laicism, and the dissolution of the natural order are gestated. For the State to finance its exaltation is equivalent to proclaiming a civil religion without God, where revealed truth is replaced by political will.