Following Orders

[Lady Christina de Pond]

i like it as well.

[Sir William Marcus]

[Monsignor de Beaumanoir]

Let's see the Sisters match that!

[Monsignor de Beaumanoir]

BREAKING NEWS:

This will fall right in Sister Falchion's lap!

Knights Templar's 700-year old prayer published

The Associated Press
Published: August 22, 2008

VATICAN CITY: The Vatican newspaper has published what it said was a prayer composed by the Knights Templar during their imprisonment for heresy 700 years ago.

King Philip IV of France arrested and tortured leaders of the secretive military order on charges of heresy and immorality in 1307 in what many historians believe was an attempt to seize their riches.
In October, the Vatican presented documents from its secret archives that shed light on the subsequent trial of the Knights Templar. Among the documents was a long-lost parchment showing that Pope Clement V had initially absolved the medieval Christian order from the accusations of heresy that eventually brought about its downfall.

The prayer was read during the trial, Vatican paper L'Osservatore Romano said in its Thursday's editions. It shows, along with the other documents from the Vatican archives, that "the accusations of heresy were groundless," the paper said.

The prayer appeals to the Virgin Mary to free the order, "despite all the lies that have been thrown at us by liars," and guide the order's enemies toward "truth and charity," according to the paper.
"It is a passionate poem that speaks of pain, endless waiting, anguish, but also of hope," Barbara Frale, a Vatican archives researcher who has been studying the documents, wrote in L'Osservatore. "It was composed by the Templars in prison, but might be said by anybody finding himself in a moment of despair and difficulty."

The military order of the Poor Knights of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon was founded in 1118 in Jerusalem to protect pilgrims in the Holy Land after the First Crusade.

As their military might increased, the Templars also grew in wealth, acquiring property throughout Europe and running a primitive banking system. Frale described them as a "multinational at the service of crusades."

After the Templars left the Middle East with the collapse of the Crusader kingdoms, their power and secretive ways aroused the fear of European rulers and sparked accusations of corruption and blasphemy.

Historians believe Philip owed debts to the order due to his wars with England and used the accusations to arrest its leaders and extract, under torture, confessions of heresy as a way to seize their assets.

The newly found parchment shows that Clement initially absolved the Templar leaders of heresy, scholars said. However, the pope did find them guilty of immorality and planned to reform the order. Under pressure from Philip, Clement later reversed his decision and suppressed the order in 1312.
But even as the order was suppressed, the mystique and legend surrounding it have survived. Recently, the best-seller "The Da Vinci Code" linked the Templars to the story of the Holy Grail.

[Lady Christina de Pond]

  how to approach this challenge...
should i just repost it or should i locate a latin generater thingy

[Monsignor de Beaumanoir]

Vatican scholar: prayer proves Knights Templar not heretical

The Vatican has for the first time published the prayer the Knights Templar composed when "unjustly imprisoned", in which they appealed to the Virgin Mary to persuade "our enemies" to abandon "calumnies and lies" and revert to "truth and charity".

L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, said the prayer was further proof that the order, which was dissolved in the fourteenth century, was not heretical. The knights were innocent of the charges against them, which included the accusation that they worshipped idols such as a "monstrous statue, half man and half goat".

The L'Osservatore Romano article, by Barbara Frale, the Vatican Secret Archives scholar who has made a special study of the knights, said it was untrue that the knights were guilty of "decadence, heresy and immoral practices".

The move follows legal action by the alleged heirs of Knights Templar to force the Vatican to restore the reputation of the disgraced order and acknowledge that assets worth some 80 million pounds were confiscated.

The Association of the Sovereign Order of the Temple of Christ, based in Spain, says that when the order was dissolved by Pope Clement V in 1307, over 9000 properties, farms and and commercial ventures belonging to knights were seized by the Church.

It is not however demanding that they be handed back, only that the order be "rehabilitated". A British branch also claiming descent from the Knights Templar and based in Hertfordshire has called for a papal apology for the persecution of the order.

The Knights Templar were founded at the time of the First Crusade in the eleventh century to protect Christians making the pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The Order was endorsed by the Vatican, but when Acre fell in 1291 and the Crusaders lost their hold on the Holy Land support faded, amid growing envy of the order's fortune in property and banking, and rumours about its corrupt and arcane secret ceremonies.

Whispers said novices had to deny Christ three times, spit on the cross, strip naked and kiss their superior on the buttocks, navel, and lips and submit to sodomy. King Philip IV of France, who coveted the order's wealth, arrested its leaders and put pressure on Clement V to dissolve it. Several knights, including the Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, were burned at the stake.
However Dr Frale said the arrests by Philip IV were "absolutely illegal". She said "legends and inventions" about the knights had been perpetuated by "fantasies" such as Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code and - "though of a different literary calibre" - Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum.

She said that in 1312 Pope Clement had declared that the Templars were not heretics, and had explained that he had only dissolved the order to prevent Philip IV from "opening up a schism in the Church". She said proof of the Templars' fidelity to the Pope and Christian dogma lay in the prayer they had composed during their long imprisonment.

It was "beautiful and moving" and "full of poetry", Dr Frale said, but "incredibly has never been studied".The prayer is addressed to "Holy Mary, mother of God", the "consolation of those who hope", and "humbly implores" her to obtain freedom for the order "through the intercession of the angels, archangels, prophets, evangelists, apostles, martyrs, confessors and virgins". It adds that the Virgin Mary knows that "our enemies" have spread "calumnies and lies" about the order, and pleads with her to make them "return to truth and charity".

Last October the Vatican launched a scheme to market limited reproductions of Processus Contra Templarios (Papal Inquiry into the Trial of the Templars), also known as the Chinon document, which Dr Frale discovered in the Vatican archives in 2003 after realising that it had been wrongly catalogued.

She said the parchment proved Clement V had accepted the Templars were not guilty of heresy. Their initiation ceremony involved spitting on the Cross, but this was to brace them for having to do so if captured by Muslim forces.

[Sir William Marcus]

It appears a joyous celebration may be officially in order

[Lady Christina de Pond]

  we like celebrations what is the news dear brother

[Monsignor de Beaumanoir]

[Sir William Marcus]

 Beat me to that one brother

[Lady Christina de Pond]

  don't have to be snotty i get it. 

[Mikael of Aragon]

don't have to be snotty i get it. 

We can't help it. Those nose guards push the nose in and gets it all snotty. Also gets in the way of the ale...

[Sir William Marcus]

I am snotty too   as I have contracted my princesses cold which she received the first week of kindergarten.

[Femme Falchion]

Don't fret Militissa...

It's a genetic problem.  

I think we're all just a bit shaken by the breaking news

[Sir William Marcus]

Frome the "Processus contro Templarios". Pope Clement V hears pleas from the Templars at the trail 700 years ago in regards to the false charges against them.