Templars had become so rich and powerful, William noted, they “have made themselves exceedingly troublesome.”
Their leader at this time was Jacques de Molay. “Born in 1244 in Vitrey, France, he entered the Knights Templar in 1265 at the age of twenty-one. After rising quickly through the ranks, he spent a great deal of time in Great Britain. Eventually appointed as visitor general and grand preceptor of all England, he was made head of the order following the death of its twenty-second grand master. He then moved from England to Cyprus. It was there in the autumn of 1307 that he found himself called back to France by order of King Philip IV, known as ‘the Fair,’ and Pope Clement V. It is believed that the summons was the result of kingly and papal fear and envy of the power and wealth of the Templars. Another explanation is that Philip the Fair was so deep in debt to the Templars that he decided the only way to eradicate it was by eliminating the order.
“On Friday, October 13, 1307, royal bailiffs entered Templar headquarters in Paris and arrested the knights. Imprisoned and tortured, they were forced to confess to heresies, among them devil worship and sexual perversions. They were offered a choice of recantation or death. While de Molay gave a confession under torture, he quickly renounced it. Condemned along with another Templar, he was taken to an island in the Seine River in the shadow of Notre Dame Cathedral and set ablaze in 1312.
“A legend arose that as the flames raged around him, he prophesied that the king and pope would die within a year. The prophecy came true. But before his death the pope dissolved the order and warned that anyone even thinking about joining the Templars would be excommunicated and charged as heretics.” Despite King Phillip and Pope Clement’s decision to eradicate the Templars, some escaped their clutches and, it is believed, established the Order in Scotland. Today the Knights Templar survive as a component of Freemasonry.
Although the archives of the Vatican and volumes of European history contain numerous accounts of interlacing objectives of kings and popes, and even instances of conspiracies, none matched the deal between Pope Clement V and Phillip the Fair to cloak avarice in religion. That Clement recognized the illegitimacy of the charges of heresy against the Knights Templar was recorded in a document that was placed in the Vatican’s secret archives and remained there for seven centuries.
To the astonishment of historians in 2008, the Vatican announced it would be publishing 799 copies of the minutes of the trials against the Templars, Processus Contra Templarios (Papal Inquiry into the Trial of the Templars) which it planned to sell for about $8,000 (5,900 euros, 4,115 British pounds). The giant work would come in a soft leather case, with detailed reproductions of the original Latin documents on the Templars trials.
Known as the Chinon parchment, for the location in France where the trials were held, the document recorded why Pope Clement V dissolved the Templars and issued arrest warrants for all members. The small parchment had been discovered in the Vatican’s secret archives in 2001 by Professor Barbara Frale.
“I could not believe it when I found it,” she said. “The paper was put in the wrong archive in the seventeenth century.
“The document…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 for membership. 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 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 the French and prevent a schism in the church.
“This is proof that the Templars were not heretics,” said Professor Frale.
“The document contains the absolution Pope Clement V gave to the Grand Master of the Temple, 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 deals with the first phase of the trial of the Templars, when Pope Clement V was still convinced he might be able to guarantee the survival of the military-religious order and meet 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.
“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 another military-religious order…. The Act of Chinon, a requirement to carry out the reform, remained however a dead letter. The French monarchy reacted by initiating a blackmail mechanism, which would have obliged Clement V to take a final decision during the Council of Vienna (1312). Unable to oppose the will of King, Phillip the Fair, who ordered the elimination of the Templars, the Pope heard the opinion of the Council Fathers and decided to abolish the Order…. Clement stated that this suffered decision did not amount to an act of heretic condemnation, which could not be reached on the basis of the various inquiries carried out in the years prior to the Council….
“According to the pontiff, the scandal aroused by the ‘shameful accusations’ against the Knights Templar (heresy, idolatry, homosexuality and obscene behavior) would have dissuaded anyone from wearing the Templar habit and on the other hand, a delay on a decision regarding these issues would produce the squandering of the great wealth the Christians in the Holy Land offered to the Templars, charged with the duty to help fight against the enemies of the Faith in the Holy Land. The attentive consideration of these dangers, together with the pressure of the French, convinced the Pope to abolish the Order of the Knights of the Temple.”
Pope Clement’s absolution was of no earthly value to de Molay. For the sins and crimes against God and the Church to which he confessed under torture, he was burned at the stake. Other Templars were also executed, and the Templar treasures were confiscated by King Phillip.
Following publication of the Chinon document, the London Daily Telegraph reported “that the Association of the Sovereign Order of the Temple of Christ had launched a court case in Spain, demanding that Pope Benedict ‘recognize’ the seizure of Templar assets worth [100 billion euros]. The Spanish-based group of Templars declared, ‘We are not trying to cause the economic collapse of the Roman Catholic Church, but to illustrate to the court the magnitude of the plot against our Order.’”
Of the revelations in the Chinon parchment Time magazine noted, “The notion of that much money, power and influence vanishing at a Papal pen stroke appears to have been too much for the mythic sensibility of the West, which wanted to believe that the Templars must somehow have survived, adapted, or been subsumed into another, even more secretive transnational group.
“Over the centuries, the allegedly still-extant order has been portrayed as malevolent, benign, heroic and occult. Time observed that “organizations all over the world, without any direct connection, have appropriated its name…Such homages should not obscure the fact that however much power they enjoy in the realm of fiction and fantasy, it almost certainly does not equal that which they once actually possessed—and then abruptly lost.”
Five centuries after Pope Clement V colluded with Phillip the Fair to wipe out the Templars, the Vatican archives received a declaration known as a papal “bull” (encyclical) issued by Pope Leo XIII that prohibited membership by Catholics in the Freemasons. Titled Humanum Genus, issued on April 20, 1884, it stated, “Let no man think that he may for any reason whatsoever join the Masonic sect, if he values his Catholic name and his eternal salvation as he ought to value them.” The Code of Canon Law, 1917 edition, in Canon 2335, declared, “Persons joining associations of the Masonic sect or any others of the same kind which plot against the Church and legitimate civil authorities contract ipso facto excommunication simply reserved to the Apostolic See.”
On July 18, 1974, Cardinal Franjo Šeper, Prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, wrote a letter to the presidents