Grand
York Rite
of Freemasonry
of the State of Missouri
Please find below my Grand Council Educational Presentation, which I was assigned by the Grand Master of the Grand Council, Most Illustrious Companion Robert Bray, as part of my duties as a member of the Educational Committee of the Missouri Grand Council. Thanks. Dr. James J. Gibbons, R.E.P.G.C.
Vatican file shows Pope pardoned massacred Knights
British News, March 30, 2002, filed from Rome by Richard Owen
Vatican documents have come to light showing that the wholesale massacre of the Knights Templar in the Middle Ages for alleged "heresy, idolatry and sexual perversion"--an episode still shrouded in mystery--took place even though the Pope had exonerated them in a secret trial.
The revelation will put pressure on the present Pope, who has asked the Muslim world for forgiveness for the Crusades, to apologize for the persecution of one of the main Crusading Orders as well. The Templars, whose legendary power and wealth still exert a fascination, were disbanded by Pope Clement V at the Council of Vienne in France in 1312.
L'Avvenire, the Catholic Daily, said that the record of the Pope's investigation was thought to have been lost when Napoleon looted the Vatican during his invasion of Italy in the 18th century, and that its recovery was an exceptional event.
The Templar Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, was burnt at the stake on the orders of Phillip IV of France (known as Phillip the Fair because of his complexion), who coveted the Templar Order's land and treasure and began a campaign of dawn arrests and torture on Friday, October 13, 1307 (this is where the superstition about Friday the 13th being so unlucky originated). At least 2,000 Knights were killed in an attempt to obliterate the Order altogether. It was revived in the 18th century as part of the Masonic movement, which is said to have inherited some of the Templars' secret rituals.
Barbara Frale, a researcher at the Vatican School of Paleontology, said that the consensus among historians was that Pope Clement V, who was himself French and a former Archbishop of Bordeaux, had been pliant and weak, and had colluded in Phillip the Fair's scheme to wipe out the Templars and seize their fortune. But documents found in the Vatican archives, including a long-lost parchment, proved that the Pope had in fact maneuvered "with skill and determination" to ensure that his own emissaries questioned de Molay and other leading Templars in the dungeon of Chinon castle in the Loire in 1308, in what amounted to a Papal trial.
Signora Frale, who is writing a book based on the Chinon parchment, told the Italian monthly magazine Hera, a journal of historical mysteries, that the result was the complete exoneration of the Knights.
The Pope had accepted the Knights' explanation that the charges against them of sodomy and blasphemy were due to a misunderstanding of arcane rituals behind closed doors which had their origins in the Crusaders' bitter struggle against the Muslims, or Saracens. These included "denying Christ and spitting on the Cross three times," as well as "kissing other men's behinds." Adriano Forgione, editor of Hera, said that these were intended to simulate the kind of humiliation and torture that a Crusader might be subjected to by the Saracens if captured. They were taught how to abuse their own religion "with the mind only and not with the heart."
The Knights Templar--properly called the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon--were founded during the early Crusades in the 11th century, when they protected pilgrims journeying to the Holy Land, together with the Hospitallers (or Knights of St. John). The Templars were so called because they were given part of the former Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem as their headquarters.
Noting that de Molay and the Knights had asked his pardon, the Pope wrote: "We hereby decree that they are absolved by the church and may again receive Christian sacraments." Signor Forgione said that the Pope had failed to make this absolution public because the scandal of the Templars had aroused extreme passions and he feared a church schism. Phillip IV had de Molay and the other Templar leaders put to death before the Pope's verdict could be published, and it was subsequently lost.
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