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The Vatican is to publish a book which is expected to shed light on the demise of the Knights Templar, a Christian military order from the Middle Ages. The book is based on a document known as the Chinon parchment, found in the Vatican Secret Archives six years ago after years of being incorrectly filed. The document is a record of the heresy hearings of the Templars before Pope Clement V in the 14th Century. The official who found the paper says it exonerates the knights entirely. Prof Barbara Frale, who stumbled across the parchment by mistake, says that...

By the time Abraham Lincoln won the presidential election in 1860, there had already been several attempts on his life. His anti-slavery stance caused the nation to split within days of his victory. Because his life was in danger, he was hidden in the luggage rack of the train that took him into Washington, D.C., and for the first time in our democracy, a duly elected president had to be sneaked into the White House under the cover of darkness. Decades before Lincoln, Joseph Smith’s progressive announcement that he would run for president on an anti-slavery platform was explosive and...

It was the ruined citadel at Montsegur that got us hooked on the story of the Cathars, a breakaway group of Christians viciously persecuted by the Catholic Church in 12th and 13th century France. Perched on a craggy limestone peak, close to the Pyrenees, this fortress sheltered a group of Cathars besieged by Catholic crusaders for 10 months. Eventually defeated, 220 men and women filed down a steep winding path to be burned en masse in an enclosure on the grassy meadow below the citadel in 1244. Burning was the French Inquisition's nifty way of recreating hell, a concept in...

A hot and fetid June night on the small Mediterranean island of Malta, and a Christian sentry patrolling at the foot of a fort on the Grand Harbour had spotted something drifting in the water. The alarm was raised. More of these strange objects drifted into view, and men waded into the shallows to drag them to the shore. What they found horrified even these battle-weary veterans: wooden crosses pushed out by the enemy to float in the harbour, and crucified on each was the headless body of a Christian knight. This was psychological warfare at its most brutal, a...

Five Hundred Years Since Columbus: Lessons of the Church's History by Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J. Our reflections so far on Christopher Columbus have concentrated on his Catholic discovery of America. Our stress has been on the providential role that Columbus played in initiating the most fruitful conversion to Catholic Christianity since apostolic times. Too much has happened since 1492 and no two evaluations will be the same. However, there are certain aspects of our Catholic history since Columbus that are too obvious to be missed. They are also too important not to learn from the past how God wants...

What one individual would you identify as the virtual founder of America? Would it be George Washington? Thomas Jefferson? Thomas Paine? Benjamin Franklin? I believe that the man history clearly gives this designation to is a humble reformer from Geneva, Switzerland, who died in 1564. His name is John Calvin. The great American historian, George Bancroft, who was far from a Calvinist, calls John Calvin “the father of America.” According to Bancroft, “He who will not honor the memory and respect the influence of Calvin knows but little of the origin of American liberty.” If we are to get back...

worldwide birthday party is being planned to celebrate the life and legacy of John Calvin, one of the founding fathers of the Protestant Reformation. "Protestant theology and Western democracy owe a debt of gratitude to John Calvin," says Peter Lillback, president of Westminster Theological Seminary outside Philadelphia and one of the driving forces behind Calvin 500, a celebration that culminates on July 10, 2009, five centuries after Calvin's birth. "Calvin is maligned or, worse, sometimes forgotten today. But along with his brother in the faith, Martin Luther, Calvin did much for the revival of biblical Christianity," declares Lillback. Calvin was...

[ ] The following article is located at:http://www.christianitytoday.com/history/features/131christians.html This week's Christians everyone should know Buy the book containing these and many other profiles of Christians you should know. New this week: Richard AllenInnocent IIILouis IXErasmusJohn FoxeFrancis BaconJustinian I and Theodora IBonifaceHugh Latimer & Nicholas RidleyJohn SmythJohn DonnePatrick

Picture the following scenario. Crowds of Americans rioting in the streets. Two opposing groups shout loudly, vying to have their messages heard and heeded. The groups meet. Confrontation ensues. Fistfights break out. Church windows are smashed. What are these rioters fighting about? Christmas. One group favors celebrating Christmas, the other opposes all Christmas observances. This isn’t an imaginary event, it is history. It happened in Boston on Christmas day in 1706. In America's increasing love-affair with Christmas (both the Christian and commercial versions), we have forgotten that there was a time when much of European and American Christianity thought that...

Monasteries and Madrassas: Five Myths About Christianity, Islam, and the Middle Ages By H. W. Crocker III Does Islam need a Reformation? Not unless you think it would benefit from additional dollops of Puritanism; further encouragement to smash altars, stained glass, and other forms of ?idolatry?; prodding to ban riotous celebrations like Christmas and Easter; and support for fundamentalist Islamic schools that insist on sola Korana and sola Sunnah . Indeed, it would seem that Islam has already had its reformers. Railing against the corruption of the West (let's call it ?Rome? for short) have been such modern Islamic...

The planned new grave for a Catholic priest killed 85 years ago in downtown Birmingham has been dug next to St. Paul's Cathedral. The Rev. James E. Coyle, who became pastor of St. Paul's Cathedral in 1904, was shot to death on the porch of the rectory, the priest's house, on Aug. 11, 1921. He is buried at Elmwood Cemetery. The Rev. Richard Donohoe, current pastor of the cathedral, plans to seek Vatican approval for moving Coyle's remains. "It would make his grave more visible and accessible to the people, for reflection on his cause for being declared a martyr...

AS A HISTORIAN OF THE HOLOCAUST, I frequently receive requests from Jewish educators, seeking support for grant applications for their Holocaust programs. Almost all these applications include a sentence about how the new program will inform students that the Pope, and the Vatican, "did nothing" during the Holocaust to help Jews. The most recent such portrayal reached me while I was writing this review. It is part of a proposal to a major Jewish philanthropic organization, and contains the sentence: "Also discusses the role of the Vatican and the rabidly anti-Semitic Pope Pius XII, who were privy to information regarding...

“The Grail,” Langdon said, “is symbolic of the lost goddess. When Christianity came along, the old pagan religions did not die easily. Legends of chivalric quests for the Holy Grail were in fact stories of forbidden quests to find the lost sacred feminine. Knights who claimed to be “searching for the chalice” were speaking in code as a way to protect themselves from a Church that had subjugated women, banished the Goddess, burned non-believers, and forbidden the pagan reverence for the sacred feminine.” (The Da Vinci Code, pages 238-239) The Holy Grail is a favorite metaphor for a desirable but...

Where It All Began The very thing which is now called the Christian religion existed among the ancients also, nor was it wanting]rom the inception if the human race until the coming if Christ in the flesh, at which point the true religion which was already in existence began to be called Christian. -ST. AUGUSTINE, Retractiones THIS ASTOUNDING STATEMENT by St. Augustine, one of the most brilliant thinkers in the earliest centuries of the Church, utterly refutes the traditional view that Christianity, though of obvious Jewish roots, virtually fell from the skies as a radically new, unique, all- surpassing religion...

For all those folks following the Good Book, we have some bad news. Turns out a lot of our modern Bible was tacked on, scratched out, and just plain garbled from the original Gospels as scribes over the millennia tried to present Christianity in what they thought was its truest light. In fact, many of our modern Bibles are based on the wrong originals, says Bart Ehrman in his best-selling book Misquoting Jesus: The Story behind who Changed the Bible and Why. Even our beloved King James version has several segments based on a 12th-century manuscript that scholars now say...

April 16, 2006 · Inscriptions and images found on tombstones, frescoes and mosaics throughout the Mediterranean show that women held respected roles in the early Christian church that were identical to those held by men. They were apostles, priests, deacons and bishops. But the Vatican's official view of church history presents women in a different light. Recently, a group of 31 American Catholic women, organized by the group FutureChurch, visited Rome to inspect the archeological evidence of female leadership. Many who made the trip say they were inspired to become more active in their local church communities."We would just like...

I am an English teacher at the high school level. Today I had a conversation with a history teacher during which I noted that communism was perhaps responsible for more deaths than any other ideology. My colleague stated that I was definitely wrong. I asked him what belief system has caused more deaths. His answer? Christianity.After you vent, can you give me a concrete place (books etc.) to start with this guy? I can't let this one go.P.S. I didn't just role over. I argued and argued, but he was adamant. I'm at a loss because I find his position...

One of the most valuable testimonies to Christ's Resurrection comes from the pen of a first-century Jew by the name of Flavius Josephus (b. A.D. 37). 1 Priest and general, as well as historian par excellence, Josephus was one of the great lights of his age, and in one of the best-known passages of his marvelous work, The Antiquities of the Jews, he not only treats the Resurrection as a fact, but also calls Jesus "the Messiah" and refers to Him as "a wise man, if indeed he should be called a man" (18.4). How a Jew could have...

What Are the Real Origins of Easter? Millions assume that Easter, one of the world's major religious holidays, is found in the Bible. But is it? Have you ever looked into Easter's origins and customs and compared them with the Bible? by Jerold Aust Easter is one of the most popular religious celebrations in the world. But is it biblical? The word Easter appears only once in the King James Version of the Bible (and not at all in most others). In the one place it does appear, the King James translators mistranslated the Greek word for Passover as...

Assyrian International News Agency Cyprus: Portrait of a Christianity Obliterated -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted GMT 3-31-2006 18:23:32 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ROMA -- The island of Cyprus was the first destination of the "special mission" that the Holy Spirit entrusted to Paul and Barnabas, according to what is written in the Acts of the Apostles, in chapter 13. On the island they found a Roman governor, Sergius Paulus, "an intelligent man who wanted to hear the word of God and believed, deeply shaken by the teaching of the Lord." But if Paul and Barnabas were to return to Cyprus today, to the northern part of...