That was then ... this is now. Enough, already!
Catholic Ping - please freepmail me if you want on/off this list
Posted on 11/29/2004 2:57:11 PM PST by blam
The last crusade of the Templars
By Ruth Gledhill
The knights want a Papal apology nearly 700 years after they were disbanded and hounded into exile
THE VATICAN is giving “serious consideration” to apologising for the persecution that led to the suppression of the Knights Templar.
The suppression, which began on Friday , October 13, 1307, gave Friday the Thirteenth its superstitious legacy.
A Templar Order in Britain that claims to be descended from the original Knights Templar has asked that the Pope should make the apology.
The Templars, based in Hertford, are hoping for an apology by 2007, the 700th anniversary of the start of the persecution, which culminated with the torture and burning at the stake of the Grand Master Jacques de Molay for heresy and the dissolution of the Order by apostolic decree in 1312.
The letter, signed by the Secretary of the Council of Chaplains on behalf of the Grand Master of the Poor Fellow Soldiers of Jesus Christ and the Temple of Solomon Grand Preceptory, with a PO box address in Hertford, formally requests an apology “for the torture and murder of our leadership”, instigated by Pope Clement V.
“We shall witness the 700th anniversary of the persecution of our order on 13th October 2007,” the letter says. “It would be just and fitting for the Vatican to acknowledge our grievance in advance of this day of mourning.”
Apologies have already been made by the Roman Catholic Church for the persecution of Galileo and for the Crusades. The Templars hope that these precedents will make their suit more likely to succeed.
Hertford Templar Tim Acheson, who is descended from the Scottish Acheson family that has established Templar links and whose family lived until recently in Bailey Hall, Hertford, said: “This letter is a serious attempt by a Templar group which traces its roots back to the medieval Order to solicit an apology from the Papacy.”
He added: “The Papacy and the Kingdom of France conspired to destroy the Order for reasons which modern historians judge to be primarily political. Their methods and motives are now universally regarded as brutal, unfair and unjustified.
“The Knights Templar officially ceased to exist in the early 1300s, but the order continued underground. It was a huge organisation and the vast majority of Templars survived the persecution, including most of their leaders, along with much of their treasure and, most importantly, their original values and traditions.”
The Hertford Mercury newspaper has reported newly discovered Templar links with Hertford, including a warren of tunnels beneath the town. At the heart of the maze of tunnels is Hertford Castle, where in 1309 four Templars from Temple Dinsley near Hitchin were imprisoned after their arrest by Edward II, who believed that they were holding a lost treasure. The treasure was never found.
When Subterranea Britannica, a group of amateur archaeologists, expressed an interest in investigating Hertford’s tunnels last month, they received anonymous threats telling them not to.
The Templars captured Jerusalem during the Crusades and were known as “keepers of the Holy Grail”, said to be the cup used at the Last Supper or as the receptacle used by Joseph of Arimathea to catch Christ’s blood as he bled on the Cross, or both.
Interest in the Templars and the Holy Grail is at an unprecedented high after the success of books such as The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown, and the earlier Holy Blood Holy Grail, by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln, which claimed that Jesus survived the crucifixion and settled in France.
The Knights Templar were founded by Hugh de Payens, a French knight from the Champagne area of Burgundy, and eight companions in 1118 during the reign of Baldwin II of Jerusalem, when they took a perpetual vow to defend the Christian kingdom. They were assigned quarters next to the Temple. In 1128, they took up the white habit of the Cistercians, adding a red cross. The order knights, sergeants, farmers and chaplains amassed enormous wealth.
In Rome, a Vatican spokesman said that the demand for an apology would be given “serious consideration”. However, Vatican insiders said that the Pope, 84, was under pressure from conservative cardinals to “stop saying sorry” for the errors of the past, after a series of papal apologies for the Crusades, the Inquisition, Christian anti-Semitism and the persecution of scientists and “heretics” such as Galileo.
Leaving aside the issue of this call for an apology - I find that trivial.
Does anyone have any opinion, on the issue of Templar survivance? Do you think that they did survive, in what form, or had any lasting impact?
Interestingly the Templars made their money by beginning a form of long range banking/credit transfer - establishing lines of credit for crusaders.
Yeah my "wiped out" was perhaps an exagerration. The leaders were executed, not every last one. But the Templars as a functioning large-scale organization with the power they had was gone.
Now is not the time to stop saying 'sorry'. The Knights Templar WERE wrongly persecuted and excoriated and they DO deserve an apology. What's suddenly so wrong with setting the record straight?
For the usual reasons...sodomy, heresy, and sacrilege. The same things that endear bishops today to the liberal media.
The sober consensus is that the charges were trumped up and that money and power issues were the real motives. If some members had strayed into homosexualism and gnostic occultism, it would not be the only instance an organization of merely human men ostensibly dedicated to lofty goals fell prey to the minstrations and temptations of evil.
"The same things that endear bishops today to the liberal media."
wow -- the truth doth sting
Priory de Sion - Switzerland. What is the symbol on the Swiss flag?
Strategerist - I read "Foucault's Pendulum" too and I agree! Every other chapter was excruciatingly dull - Eco really needed to hire an editor for that one.
But it had its moments - just miss out all the chapters to do with S American orixias. Plus there was a slightly cool bit near the end: to paraphrase - why waste your time with occultism, when you can touch Christ's Body in any Church? But Eco didn't exactly make the idea fly.
The parts where Jacopo Belbo was flashing back to WWII in his village were really pointless and dull...
Indeed, it probably could have been cut by 1/3rd.
I believe Pendulum was his first book after the surprise smash hit The Name of the Rose so perhaps they were afraid to really edit him.
It's really an encylopedia of history on all these various groups...Templars, Rosicrucians, Bavarian Illuminati, Assassins...that people get curious about.
That was then ... this is now. Enough, already!
Catholic Ping - please freepmail me if you want on/off this list
That's a wild read. He does cover the sensationalist speculation that the Templars merged with the Assassins (in the Middle East during the Crusades) and later reappeared as the Jesuits, doesn't he? An ironic joke of sorts. Like the early Rosicrucian manifestoes. The part about the Nazi search for the kabala tattoos pointing to the directions to the subterranean entrance to Agartha (Tibet) was a howler!
Now, that's a novel that would make a bizarre film!
Well, he COVERS a lot of wild speculation without actually endorsing it.
Anyway, being a skeptic I liked the central plot twist of Pendulum. It might annoy others, though.
I am a descendant of quarrelsome peasants and minor court officers, bailiffs and such.
Bohemund: Please pray for the repose of the soul of Kenneth Coford, a POR member and economics professor who died recently of cancer at 55 years of age. He was a very good guy. Anyone else is free to join in.
The pope was on board but there is nothing to apologize for.
I'm inclined to agree
Now THERE'S a good idea....and some good possibilities...
That reminds me, I need to consolidate & clean up Grampa's Templar items.
If you check the names of the knights buried in the Templar church in London and keyword through google for family genealogies you will find lineal, blood descendants of English Templars. Some pass through lines of Sons of the American Revolution. You can find Catholic and Protestant descendants of these.
BlackElk--Will do.
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