In his book, Vigilant Catholic, David Dionisi details unresolved scandals among the hierarchy in Liberia and claims that top Churchmen are members of a local variant of Freemasonry known as The Poro.
Dionisi worked as a missionary in Liberia for many years and helped to break the news of the sexual abuse of seminarians by an two prelates, Archbishop Lewis Zeigler and Bishop Andrew Karnley. He claims that sex abuse is “a weapon” used by secret societies to pressure good priests into leaving the Church. Homosexuals are routinely ordained and promoted while those men who are faithful to the Magisterium are often passed over, denied medical care or may even become the victims of false accusations.
Local secret societies based in witchcraft, such as Liberia’s Poro, have always existed in Africa, but there is evidence that Freemasons gained control of The Poro more than a hundred years ago. Traditional rituals of passage for boys still continue: these include invocations of demons, sex magic and sodomy. Girls are initiated into a corresponding group known as Sande, and also experience physical and sexual abuse during the rituals. Sometimes the rituals are so harsh that the children do not survive and members are bound under a code of silence similar to Freemasonry’s prohibition on revealing its secrets. Some members began to speak out when accusations of abuse became public, verifying details of the rituals that had up until then been completely shrouded in secrecy.
Shockingly, some Catholic associations have adopted similar initiations and as well as the code of extreme secrecy. The founder of one group has also been accused of covering up the sexual abuse of minors and is a close friend of the sexually-abusive bishops mentioned above. David Dionisi names sixteen Catholic priests and prelates whom he believes to be members of the Poro sect; some of the group are said to belong to more than one secret society.
One of this group, a priest by the name of Fr Gareth Jenkins groomed numerous boys, allowing many to sleep at his home. Those boys who accepted his sexual advances were allowed to later enter the seminary, whereas those who rejected Fr Jenkins were stopped from becoming priests.
The code of silence has led to the widespread failure to act against the predatory bishops and appeals to the Nuncio fell on deaf ears. This is hardly surprising, though, as Dionisi claims a former nuncio, Archbishop George Antonysamy was part of the homosexual network in Liberia. The current nuncio, Bishop Borwah, is named on the list of Poro society members, and told Dionisi that Pope Francis personally put a stop to an investigation of the Liberian Church.
A former priest-turned-whistleblower, Fr Gabriel Sawyer, wrote a seventeen page testimony which has many similarities to Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano’s explosive 2018 expose. Like Archbishop Vigano, Fr Sawyer was forced into hiding after receiving death threats. He claims he married his life-long friend in order to escape from the persecution. This fits a pattern that has occurred in other parts of Africa, eg Cameroon, where a bishop was assassinated for refusing to cave in to a homosexual priest cabal in 2017. The Liberian prelates unsurprisingly denied the allegations and pointed to the priest’s marriage as an indication of his lack of credibility, despite his having corroborating testimony from five other priests and laymen. Fr Sawyer’s case reached the Vatican in June of 2019 but despite two years having passed, there has been no public investigation or statement made on the case.
In a further attempt to launch an investigation into the multiple allegations of abuse, David Dionisi met with Cardinal Sean O’Malley in the United States in 2019. After hearing the testimony of this credible witness and refusing to speak via Skype with a senior Liberian priest, O’Malley dismissed him, saying: “At my level, I do not deal with individual cases, I establish best practices.”
Those words would have been of little comfort to those children who were denied access to medical care or funding for their education when David Dionisi’s outreach was suspended or worse, became victims of sexual abuse.
On a continent where corruption is rampant, it is no surprise that Freemasonry should also be very prominent. Its melding with witchcraft also explains how the syncretism which plagues the Catholic Church in Africa has come to be so entrenched. The case also highlights the fact that Pope Francis routinely rejects his own protocols for clerical sex abuse allegations, as laid out in the Motu Proprio, Vos Estis Lux Mundi.
Catholics should have little hope that Pope Francis is sincere about conquering this scourge which has wounded many thousands of children and adults and has decimated the Church. It is time to acknowledge that there exists in the Church a loyalty that surpasses that of thieves and sodomites: it is the blood-tie of Ecclesiastical Masonry.
Ecclesiastical Freemasonry 