‘Bro. PacMan’

    

Courtesy Mamamayang Pilipino Lodge (UD)

Philippine Senator Emmanuel Dapidran Paquiao has been made a Freemason, having received the Entered Apprentice Degree in Mamamayang Pilipino Lodge (UD) in the Philippines.

Bro. EA Paquiao is known worldwide as Manny “PacMan” Paquiao, the devastating prize fighter who set multiple records in championship boxing in an amazing career that spanned almost 25 years.

In 2016, he was elected to his nation’s Senate as a member of the majority Philippine Democratic Party-People’s Power, which was cofounded in 1983 by Benigno Aquino (who, you may recall, was murdered that year in the event that spelled the end of the Marcos regime).

PacMan is retired from boxing, but I wouldn’t want to be a Ruffian in his Third Degree.

Freemasonry in the Philippines has inauspicious origins in the mid eighteenth century due to friction between British colonists who were Masons and the Spanish Roman Catholic authorities. It played out pretty much as you would expect with the latter harassing, jailing, and deporting the former. The Spanish government banned Freemasonry several times in the early nineteenth century. In later decades, Portuguese and German Masons were able to establish lodges, and in 1876 the Grand Orient of Spain made a provincial grand lodge, and so the fraternity was cemented in the country.

The Spanish-American War resulted in the Philippines coming under U.S. control, which was hugely beneficial to Freemasonry there, as grand lodges in California, Scotland, and elsewhere began establishing lodges.

The Grand Lodge of the Philippines was founded in 1912. Naturally its fortunes were shaped by the Second World War, but it flourishes today. In addition, there are thriving lodges of ethnic Filipinos in New York, New Jersey, and elsewhere in the United States.