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>If you bothered to check at all you would know that it was the French king and not the Church that attacked the Templars. Although Pope Clement’s succumbing to the pressure of King Phillip to disband the Templars may not be commendable, to transfer the crimes of the French king to the Church is not honest.

So are we still looking for the Papal Bull of Protest against the French King? Oh, thats right, the Pope who could send thousands of Crusaders off to the Holy Land, who could get the Holy Roman Emperor on his knees in a hair shirt, is just fretting on his throne.

Please look at this in rational way. The French King pretty much seized (at least) a few hundred million dollars of the Churches assets and tortured and killed members of a Church holy order and the Pope just sat by idly? If this was not done with the Popes okay the Pope should have put the French king under threat of excommunication immediately. But in order to whitewash the church from its sin of collusion you have the pope just sitting there helpless to stop what you yourself call the crimes of the French king?

Or are you saying that the Pope allowed this to happen over serious sins of the templars, much of which were overblown confessions of racked men looking for an end to the torture?

Yes, lets be honest, the Pope had his hand in this mess, and probably gold was exchanged for his silence.

I think that there is little doubt that Pope Clement was weak in this matter. The Catholic Encylopedia article on the Knights Templars which is worth a read, calls him "irresolute and harassed".

"The pope, irresolute and harrassed, finally adopted a middle course: he decreed the dissolution, not the condemnation of the order, and not by penal sentence, but by an Apostolic Decree (Bull of 22 March, 1312)."

It was a sad end to a once proud order.

So are we still looking for the Papal Bull of Protest against the French King? Oh, thats right, the Pope who could send thousands of Crusaders off to the Holy Land, who could get the Holy Roman Emperor on his knees in a hair shirt, is just fretting on his throne.

You don't know your history very well. Pope Clement was a wholly-owned, bought-and-paid-for rubber-stamp stooge of King Phillip, as any Catholic historian will tell you. Why do you think they call this period (which began with Clement, and ended shortly before Luther's birth) the "Babylonian Captivity of the Church"?

Of course he never taught any heresy (dogmatically or otherwise), but if you're looking for someone to stand up courageously against Phillip, Clement isn't your man. His predecessor, Boniface VIII, did that, and paid for it dearly. But in the long view of history (at least for Catholics), Boniface is the good guy.