How to go public?

One of the hardest challenges of Freemasonry is to be public, more transparent without loosing its actractiveness and the reserved dimension of its ritual secrets. There is no chance in persisting in being secretive in an era when open societies prevail as model for modern comonwealths in the West and increasingly in other parts of the world. Karl Popper has remarked in a famous work “Open Societies and its Enemies” that time has come for societies to be accountable to citizens and leaders to respond to the awareness of the people they govern. Returning to the scaffold of closed societies is to embrace again the entropy of the Dark Ages where magic was the escape for a reclusive dimension of liberty and religion was not seen as door to fulfilness but as a veil.

Freemasonry needs to learn how to live with this demand of transparency and openess, with the media always attentive of what is happening inside doors, and normally for the worst reasons.  This is a fact of life that Masonic leaderships need to accomodate. In this site we have reporting, briefly, this encounter (not always successful) of a Order with secrets with a profane world in which discretion is perceived as synonymous of desguise and conspiration. Some Obediences are more akeen in doing this job then others. The UGLE and the American North and South Jurisdictions have till now done a good job on this. The GLNF and the African Crafts were the less successful on it. Latin American and the Spanish Crafts are in the middle runway. 

21^st century Masonic leaders are for matter of education and sensitivity better positioned to interiorize this issue in a relaxed mood. They know what they should publicize and acknowledge that in an exposed society, a professional relation with the media is not only welcome but compulsory. They should meet with it in a professional way, on our regard.