Posted on 10/05/2007 1:44:55 PM PDT by NYer
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 it lays bare the rituals and ceremonies over which the Templars were accused of heresy.
In the hearings before Clement V, the knights reportedly admitted spitting on the cross, denying Jesus and kissing the lower back of the man proposing them during initiation ceremonies.
However, many of the confessions were obtained under torture and knights later recanted or tried to claim that their initiation ceremony merely mimicked the humiliation the knights would suffer if they fell into the hands of the Muslim leader Saladin.
The leader of the order, Jacques de Moley, was one of those who confessed to heresy, but later recanted.
He was burned at the stake in Paris in 1314, the same year that the Pope dissolved the order.
However, according to Prof Frale, study of the document shows that the knights were not heretics as had been believed for 700 years.
In fact she says "the Pope was obliged to ask for pardons from the knights... the document we have found absolves them".
Details of the parchment will be published as part of Processus contra Templarios, a book that will be released by the Vatican's Secret Archive on 25 October.
Interesting...thanks for posting!
Bump & Ping
Some have theorized that the Jedi Purge was based in part on the insidious destruction of the Knights Templar on Friday 13. (along with Kristal Nacht and the World War 2 Holocaust).
If true, the Vatican should issue an official apology (albeit, the Templars were dissolved in 1307 (when they were massacred.) There are 13 thousand plus souls who deserve this symbolic apology. SMIB
Why did the Catholic church allow a falsehood to exist for 700 years?
The bottom line on the Knights is that the King of France decided he didn’t want to pay back all the money he had borrowed off them. So, with the tacit consent of the Vatican, he butchered a bunch of them in a sudden purge after torturing “confessions” out of them. DeMolay was buned on Fri. 13 which became the basis for the superstition of that day being bad luck. (it certainly was for the KT)
“If true, the Vatican should issue an official apology (albeit, the Templars were dissolved in 1307 (when they were massacred.) There are 13 thousand plus souls who deserve this symbolic apology. SMIB”
Good point.
According to History channel show on it, the instigator of the trial of the Knights Templar was the French King, who had owed the Templars a lot of money. The King also at the time had his own Avignon Pope (time of papal schism) so it wasn’t the Pope in Rome who was overseeing this.
Soooo, who does the movie?
Jackson?
The guy that did the hobbit?
VATICAN SECRET ARCHIVES: "PROCESSUS CONTRA TEMPLARIOS"
VATICAN CITY, OCT 4, 2007 (VIS) - On October 25 in the Vatican's Old Synod Hall, the presentation will take place of the "Processus contra Templarios," a book published by the Vatican Secret Archives on the subject of the Knights Templar, the medieval military-religious order founded in Jerusalem in 1118 and suppressed by Pope Clement V (1305-1314).
According to a communique made public yesterday afternoon, the new volume is "a previously unpublished and exclusive edition of the complete acts of the original hearing against the Knights Templar." The book, unique of its kind, will have a print run "rigorously limited to 799 copies" and contains the "faithful reproduction of the original parchments conserved in the Vatican Secret Archives."
The project, the communique concludes, "is part of the series of 'Exemplaria Praetiosa,' ... the most elaborate and important publication yet undertaken by the Pontifical Archives."
The new volume will be presented by Archbishop Raffaele Farina S.D.B., archivist and librarian of Holy Roman Church; Bishop Sergio Pagano, prefect of the Vatican Secret Archives, and experts such as the historian Franco Cardini and the archaeologist and author Valerio Massimo Manfredi." .../TEMPLARS/VATICAN SECRET ARCHIVESVIS 071004 (200)
Not the first time nor the last.
The Pope at the time as I understand it viewed the Knight’s as a threat and desired the treasure they had accumulated over the years.. so he set out to destroy them, and their standing.
The vatican exterminated the Templars. The book will be whitewash.
Only 799 copies? Shoot, guess it won’t be available on Amazon. :->
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