The paths of Freemasonry are also inscrutable. Oscar de Alfonso Ortega (Quart de Poblet, Valencia, 1967), Grand Master of the Spanish Grand Lodge since 2010, came for the John Wayne movies and the paintings of his countryman Sorolla.
-After the motion of censure, in the Courts of the Republic there were many Freemasons…
-A third of the deputies, more or less. And of all parties. One of the oaths that Masons take is to never reveal the identity of another Mason. In the Republic Freemasonry was highly politicized.
Are there Freemasons in politics
-Not only at the state level, but regional or municipal. Freemasonry today is not a pressure group or a shadow lobby. There are those in politics, law or medicine, who are bricklayers or gas station attendants. A reflection of the society in which we live.
-Why did you become a Mason
-Since I was 15 years old I had been attracted to him. He felt interest, curiosity and admiration for an organization to which George Washington, John Wayne, Blasco Ibanez or Sorolla belonged. I let it go and the call came back when I was interning at a law firm and a client arrived who was a Mason. I used to be a Rotarian.
-How many are
there
-More than three thousand. When I was elected in 2010 we were 1,800.
-Three freemason friends decided to share pantheon. Friendship is more than family
-More than friendship, fraternity. We are not family, but we consider ourselves brothers.
“Franco shot four thousand Freemasons in the war, something neither the Nazis nor the Soviets did”
-The family is a retard
-A Freemason cannot have any dependency on anyone, he must be a free man, but he has to be a good family man and a good worker. Family is important, but we welcome singles and gays.
-Where are they more present
-On
the coast, from Barcelona to Marbella. In total, we are 182 or 183 lodges throughout Spain. The one in Madrid is very important.
-The word fraternity takes you to the French Revolution
-The other way around. What he did was annihilate them, because most Masons belonged to the nobility and upper bourgeoisie. We are more of the Revolution of 1848.
-Stefan Zweig said that the author of La Marseillaise ended up in jail…
-The author of La Marseillaise was a Mason. And Guillotin too, who did not invent the guillotine, but a more humane means to shorten the suffering of the prisoners who were executed.
-Would libraries suffer without Masonic authors
-I’m a lawyer, but I can quote Mozart, Goethe, Churchill, Fleming, Ford, the one with the cars, Kipling.
Without them the world would be worse…
-And more boring. They were also Freemasons Cantinflas and El Gordo y el Flaco, both of whom made a parody in the movies. And Walt Disney was too. I’m not saying Fleming invented penicillin because he was a Freemason, but Freemasonry always promoted scientific progress. Freemasons are Alfred Nobel, creator of the TNT, and the one of the Red Cross. In the War of Independence of the United States there were on both sides. Allende was a Mason. And Pinochet.
-Are there in football
-In The Book of One Hundred Masonic Inventions, Xavi Casinos says that the first presidents of Liverpool and Manchester United were Masons.
-Hobbies of a Mason
– Anyone’s. Movies and reading. I used to do Thai boxing, but I had surgery ten months ago and the doctor forbade it. I have changed it for swimming. I do very well the Valencian paella. She even says it to my father-in-law.
-Is there a lot of legend
-I try to explain throughout Spain what we are and, above all, what we are not.
-Freemasons in the White House -As far as
I know, only Gerald Ford. Neither the Kennedys nor Bush nor Obama. Nor Zapatero, who always ask me. Zapatero’s grandfather if he was a Mason. He was a soldier and was shot for not joining the rebellion. His file is in the Salamanca archive.
“We do not eat children or burn churches, to be a Mason it is an indispensable requirement to be a believer”
-Royal or Republican
-Spain has had two Masonic kings, Jose Bonaparte and Amadeo de Saboya. The two foreigners, what are we going to do. And up to thirteen heads of state or presidents: Prim, Azana, Casares Quiroga, Diego Martinez Barrio.
-Thirteen. Are they superstitious –
Neither more nor less than the rest of the people. We don’t eat children or burn down churches. Against the anticlerical image, to belong to our lodge it is an essential requirement to be a believer. We only accept men.
– Do feminists accept it
– There is a great feminine lodge.
-Why do they legalize them later than Pece
-The Great Spanish Orient, heir to the lodge founded in 1810 by Pepe Botella, was in exile in Mexico and was legalized in 1982 against the criteria of Martin Villa and by the Supreme Court .
-What did Franco have against Freemasonry
-In a TVE program, Ramon Colom asked me what he would say to Franco. I would have told him that despite his persecution, the fact that he shot four thousand Freemasons, the largest massacre in the whole world, which neither the Nazis nor the Soviets did, he had not managed to eliminate us.
