Freemasonry in Costa Rica
Prominent Costa Rican figures of politics, literature, art and science, including several presidents of the Republic, were Freemasons.
[4] On January 9, 1871, the 33rd and last Supreme Council of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Central America was founded with headquarters in San Jose, Costa Rica.
[5] The requirements to be a Mason at this time were; being over 21 years of age, knowing how to read and write (something quite common since Costa Rica had high levels of literacy) and being a person of good manners.
Freemasonry spread ideas of humanism, rationalism and the French Enlightenment that quickly became popular among the intellectuals of the time and the ruling classes.
In fact the House of Teaching of Santo Tomás, founded by the freemason José María Castro Madriz and whose two first rectors Manuel Argüello Mora (literate, and nephew and foster child of the hero and Benemérito Juan Rafael Mora Porras) and Lorenzo Montúfar (liberal exiled from Guatemala) were also Masters Masons, taught the Chair of Rationalism in the Faculty of Philosophy.
[4] This promotion of liberal ideas that included the freedom of expression, of conscience and the free debate of ideas promoted during the government of Castro Madriz began to alarm the Catholic Church, which is why the first Bishop of Costa Rica Monsignor Anselmo Llorente y la Fuente is compelled to issue several condemnations to Freemasonry based on the respective papal encyclicals and reaffirms the need of the Church to guide the consciences of the people to avoid Godlessness.
During the de facto government of Jesús Jiménez Zamora that toppled Castro Madriz on November 1, 1868, anti-Masonic arguments were used to justify the defenestration, as for example, that was going to destroy the Cathedral and that would ban the catholic religion.
Próspero Fernández, a liberal soldier, of the Union Fraternal Lodge, obtains the presidency by electoral route and assumes it on August 10, 1882.
The controversy over the liberal project is not long in coming, in front of the popular Germany-born Archbishop Monsignor Bernardo Augusto Thiel.
[4] These percentages seem to disprove the accusations made by Catholic publications of the time such as Eco Católico where they affirmed that 90% of the deputies were freemasons.
[4] Where they did have much more space was in the Executive Power, from 1865 to 1906 presidents José María Castro Madriz, Bruno Carranza, Tomás Guardia (although he would retire later), José Antonio Pinto Castro, Salvador Lara Zamora, Próspero Fernández Oreamuno, Bernardo Soto Alfaro and Ascensión Esquivel Ibarra were Freemasons.
[4] During the historical period from 1865 to 1899, a series of republican and secularizing political reforms began in Costa Rica that promoted liberal ideas embraced by the social highclass of the time.
The Costa Rican freemasons can not be identified as anticlerical, in fact there is evidence that Catholic and Protestant priests were part of it and had good relations with the liberal clergy.
[5] However, it came into conflict with the local Catholic hierarchy, led by Bishop Bernardo Augusto Thiel, who was an opponent of the liberal government,[5] for which he was expelled from the country (along with the Jesuits) during the administration of Próspero Fernández and his newspaper Eco Católico closed.
According to Ricardo Martinez,[4] in the official newspaper of the Catholic Union Party wrote: ... it has been organized and receives its entire address from the Jews, at least in its highest and most secret part.
This led her to have some cultural clashes with the Catholic Church, especially on certain topics such as artistic representations or complex controversies, such as when Brenes Mesén, director of the Liceo de Heredia, authorized the teaching of evolution and did not allow the teaching of the Catholic religion, two situations that generated angry polemics with the Church.
