Brother of My Brotherhood
The condition requires the Grand Lodge of the visiting brother to be recognized by at least one Grand Lodge, which in turn is recognized by the Grand Lodge of Turkey.
The visit also requires the final approval of the Grand Master but, after all, with this decision, the Grand Lodge of Turkey officially accepts that ‘the brother of a brother is a brother’ and as such, he could be given the right to visit Turkish lodges.
This acceptance breaks the traditional equivalence between the right to visit and recognition by expanding the sphere of brethren who can visit Turkish lodges from recognized constitutions to regular ones.
At this point, it may be useful to recall that the regularity of a Grand Lodge is the fulfilment of a well-defined set of principles aiming to preserve the traditional values of Freemasonry, thus being an objective concept.
On the other hand, recognition is a subjective privilege that two Grand Lodges may or may not grant to each other. During the last couple of decades, the world panorama of Freemasonry has exhibited an ever-growing disparity between regularity and recognition.
While regularity is necessary for recognition, decisions regarding recognition typically involve additional subjective criteria, which mostly contain political elements of a Masonic, or even non-Masonic, nature.
As a result, regular Grand Lodges who are not in mutual recognition abound.
It is, in fact, this observation that motivated the said decision of the Grand Lodge of Turkey.
The traditional equivalence between the right to visit and recognition, is the product of a world in which decisions of recognition are based solely on regularity, hence the gap between recognition and regularity is non-existent.
In such a world, setting the right to visit equivalent to recognition unites all regular brothers while successfully dissociating them from understandings of Freemasonry that are not compatible with the principles of regularity.
On the other hand, setting the right to visit equivalent to recognition in a world where there is a severe gap between recognition and regularity has the ill effect of imposing barriers among regular brothers.
Moreover, when the gap between recognition and regularity is somehow ‘political’, a dissociation based on ‘politics’ is implied which, let alone having anything to do with regularity, is orthogonal to the core values of regular Freemasonry.
The decision of the Grand Lodge of Turkey breaks the traditional equivalence between recognition and the right to visit, while making the right to visit almost [2] equivalent to regularity. The decision is a step towards removing the barriers between regular brethren and towards contributing to their mobility, while preserving the dissociation of regular Freemasonry from other non-traditional approaches to the Craft.
Comments