Templar Heresy Exoneration Update
Last week I posted about the upcoming publication of a book that exonerates the Knights Templar order of heresy. The book has now been published and the Associate Press included a handy link to the Vatican's Secret Archive website. (Ed Note: How secret can they be is they have a website?) They have a page up about the Parchment of Chinon (the document recently rediscovered).
The document contains the absolution Pope Clement V gave to the Grand Master of the Temple, friar Jacques de Molay and to the other heads of the Order, after they had shown to be repented and asked to be forgiven by the Church; after the formal abjuration, which is compelling for all those who were even only suspected of heretical crimes, the leading members of the Templar Order are reinstated in the Catholic Communion and readmitted to receive the sacraments. The document, which belongs to the first phase of the trial against the Templars, when Pope Clement V was still convinced to be able to guarantee the survival of the military-religious order, meets the apostolic need to remove the shame of excommunication from the warrior friars, caused by their previous denial of Jesus Christ when tortured by the French Inquisitor.
It's a little more complicated than just a straight finding of innocence - there was a lot of political manuvuering going on between the Pope King Philip of France over what was to be done. The King eventually blackmailed Clement into essentially hiding the finding of innocence (of heresy at any rate) of the Knights.
As several contemporary sources confirm, the pope ascertained that Templars were involved in some serious forms of immorality and he planned a radical reform of the order to subsequently merge it into one body with the other important military-religious order of the Hospitallers. The Act of Chinon, which absolves the Templars, but does not discharge them, was the assumption required to carry out the reform, but it remained dead letter. The French monarchy reacted by triggering a true blackmail mechanism, which then urged Clement V to reach the ambiguous compromise ratified during the Council of Vienne in 1312: unable to oppose himself to the will of the King of France, Phillip the Fair, who imposed the elimination of the Templars, the pope removed the order from the reality of that period, without condemning or abolishing it, but isolating it in a sort of “hibernation”, thanks to a clever device of the canon law. After explicitly declaring that the trial did not prove the charge of heresy, Clement V suspended the Templar Order by means of a non definitive sentence, imposed by the necessity to avoid a serious danger to the Church that banned them, under penalty of excommunication, to use such name or their distinctive symbols.
Don't forget, Clement V was to be given a special place of honor in Dante's eighth circle of hell. (When Dante wrote The Inferno, Clement was already dead, but the journey Dante recounts in his masterpiece was supposed to have occurred several years before Clement's death.)
By Maggie, Friday, 12 October , 2007 @ 3:33 pm
Huh?
I’ll just wait for the movie version … d`oh!
By SJ Reidhead, Friday, 12 October , 2007 @ 5:49 pm
When I first read that the document was going to be released I thought there might be some end to all the speculations, etc. After reading it, I don’t think it is going to do a darn thing except fuel more speculation. It also highlights just how cheap life was, even for the pope.
SJ Reidhead
The Pink Flamingo