By Jules Gomes, Church Militant - Eight popes over 200 years in a barrage of 20 legal interdicts have condemned Freemasonry, pronouncing automatic excommunication against any Catholic who becomes a member of a masonic lodge… Now, a new book by an official of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue is claiming that a practicing Catholic can simultaneously be a Freemason and that the penalty of excommunication may "certainly not" be applied to "Catholic Freemasons."… Father Michael Heinrich Weninger launched his 500-page study… last Wednesday in Vienna, accompanied by Austrian Lodge Grand Master Georg Semler on the dais.