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.
I wouldn’t trust anything the Vatican says about the Knights Templar.
The Vatican DID NOT EXTERMINATE the Templars. They were arrested and tortured by the French at the orders of the French king. Those Templars who lived outside of France were largely untouched.
This why Templars survived as an order even somewhat after the dissolution at Vienne. Read: http://www.brill.nl/default.aspx?partid=10&mcid=3&pid=29039
Why does that matter? A pope, any pope, must suffer the same fate if revenge is the goal.
No, but there's always E-Bay!
You wrote:
“But it was known the whole life of that Pope.”
Who said that? No one. What is being claimed is that it is obvious to MODERN observers that the Templars were innocent based on this one document. That doesn’t mean that the pope believed they were innocent.
“The Pope here, appears to have a sin of omission.”
Then, according to your logic, you might be committing a sin of ommission because you are omitting obvious points here. This is what the article actually said:
“The official who found the paper says it exonerates the knights entirely.”
Okay, so the MODERN OFFICIAL believes it exonerates the Templars. What did the pope believe?
“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.”
What makes you think the pope was hiding something then?
You wrote:
“occultic Masonic”
“Oxymoron.”
More like, “Redundant”.
You wrote:
“You are correct. And the vatican went along with it because the great wealth of the Knights had made them a threat to the Church.”
No. The Church, overall, was more wealthy than the Templars could ever dream of being. Also, wealth simply wasn’t a threat to the Church in any case. The Church supported the French King for essentially four reasons: 1) the Church was trying to heal the wound left by the battle between King Philip and Pope Boniface VIII, 2) popes of the Avignon period were not only physically close to France (too close!) but were dependent upon the good graces of the French (they could not go back to Rome), 3) the popes of the period were French as was Philip, 4) the Templars looked guilty as sin.
Exactly. These were powerful men, and the crowned heads of state did not relish being in their debt.
I was just thinking how great it would be if Gibson created an epic
about the Templar Knights. 4-hours would be perfect..
“His last words were, “Let evil swiftly befall those who have wrongly condemned us - God will avenge us.”
“The chilling irony of the conclusion of this story is that Jacques DeMolay’s final words did, in fact, come true. Pope Clement V died only a month later on April 20th (he is suspected of having cancer of the bowel) and Philip IV was killed while on a hunting trip on November 29th 1314. True to the claim both men did indeed die within the year of Jacques DeMolay’s own death.”
I think he got his revenge...
The pope at the time, Clement V, was a Frenchman, but there was only one pope. From this time until the 1370s the popes lived in Avignon. The Great Schism was later, after Gregory XI returned to Rome and died there and Urban VI was elected but antagonized his cardinals so they claimed to have elected him under duress and chose someone else to be pope. Urban VI and his successors in Rome are now regarded as the legitimate popes, and the rival popes who lived in Avignon after 1378 are considered antipopes. That situation lasted until about 1415.
“If you read the article, it says the proof of their exoneration was misfiled and only just found”
I think they were found along side the FBI files and the Rose law firm billing records.
So many clerical erors, so little time.
Possible ping!
An ancestor of mine was in the order although I don’t think he was caught up with its demise.
We need them again.
I did not realize this; thanks for the posting.
Who has a dog in this fight? Freemasons for sure.
A story of this type will bring a flood of Freemasons to the fore. Especially, the Knights Templar Masons and the Order of DeMolay, after all their name is taken from the Demolay of this story.
The Roman Catholics and Freemasons have been crossways with each other for centuries over this.
No doubt, there will be many Masons posting on this claiming their hero has been vindicated. Trouble is, you’ll never know they are Masons. Most of them won’t identify themselves as such.
Does it matter? They will skew it whatever way they so choose without separating fact from fantasy. Read the book for accuracy and skip the movie as fiction.
Thanks for the ping.
the new volume is "a previously unpublished and exclusive edition of the complete acts of the original hearing against the Knights Templar."
One can only imagine what else is buried in these archives.
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