Knights Templar are absolved of Heresy by the Church 700 years later
Wednesday, February 27th, 2008
The original Christian warriors, the Knights Templar were considered the special forces of the Crusades. Armed with religion, swords, armour, and Europe’s wealth, the Templar’s mission was to protect Christian pilgrims throughout their journey to visit the Holy places in the Middle East.
200 years after the Order’s inception, King Philip IV of France reversed his opinion… arrested, gobbled up their land and monies of the Templars and charged them with heresy after horrible bouts of torture.
The charges included spitting, trampling, or urinating on the cross; while naked, being kissed obscenely by the receptor on the lips, navel, and base of the spine; heresy and worship of idols(Baphomet); institutionalized homosexuality, and also accusations of contempt of the Holy Mass and denial of the sacraments.
In the end, the Grand Master of the Templars and others were burned at the stake and were silently swept into history by Pope Clement V. But wait….700 years later,The Church is now prepared to set the record straight….the Templars aren’t heretics after all.
A new book, Processus contra Templarios, will be published by the Vatican’s Secret Archive on Oct 25, and promises to restore the reputation of the Templars, whose leaders were burned as heretics when the order was dissolved in 1314.
The new book is based on a scrap of parchment discovered in the Vatican’s secret archives in 2001 by Professor Barbara Frale. The long-lost document is a record of the trial of the Templars before Pope Clement, and ends with a papal absolution from all heresies.
The document, known as the Chinon parchment, reveals that the Templars had an initiation ceremony which involved “spitting on the cross”, “denying Jesus” and kissing the lower back, navel and mouth of the man proposing them.
The Templars explained to Pope Clement that the initiation mimicked the humiliation that knights could suffer if they fell into the hands of the Saracens, while the kissing ceremony was a sign of their total obedience.
The Pope concluded that the entrance ritual was not truly blasphemous, as alleged by King Philip when he had the knights arrested. However, he was forced to dissolve the Order to keep peace with France and prevent a schism in the church.
