Dark Mysteries of the Vatican (2 page)

When the inquiry ended a year later, the Church pronounced and declared that Galileo was “suspect of heresy” for having held and believed the “false doctrine” that the Earth was not the center of the universe. The cardinals informed Galileo, who was now seventy years old, that the Holy Office was willing to absolve him, provided that first, “with sincere heart and unfeigned faith, in our presence you adjure [recant], curse and detest the said errors and heresies.” Declaring the
Dialogue
prohibited, the panel of judges condemned him to “imprisonment in the Holy Office at our pleasure.” But they reserved “the power of moderating, commuting, or taking off” the sentence. What they might do depended on whether Galileo knelt before them to recant.

Admitting on June 21, 1633, that he had defied the warning not to speak or write in defense of Copernicus, he said, “I abjure with a sincere heart deigned faith those errors and heresies, and I curse and detest them [and] I swear that for the future I shall neither say nor assert orally or in writing such as may bring upon me similar suspicions.”

After a period of confinement, Galileo was allowed go to his home near Florence, where he lived in seclusion in failing health and going nearly blind. He died on January 8, 1642.

Accounts of his submission to the Church, published more than a century later, contain a statement that may be a legend. As he rose from his knees after recanting, he may or may not have said quietly in Italian, “Eppur si mouve.” (Nevertheless, it [the earth] does move.)

In November 1992, at a ceremony in Rome, before the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Pope John Paul II officially declared that Galileo was right. The formal rehabilitation was based on the findings of a committee of the Academy the pope set up in 1979, soon after taking office. The committee decided the Inquisition had acted in good faith, but was wrong. Today the Vatican has its own celestial observatory.

The Vatican noted that archives of the Inquisition and
Index
had not survived well through the centuries. Because the “Church had a tradition of burning many of the most delicate heresy files,” and the Inquisition’s archive was almost entirely burned on Pope Paul IV’s death in 1559, many documents had been lost. Some “were hauled off to Paris under Napoleon’s rule in 1810…and more than 2,000 volumes were burned. Some fell into rivers during transit, others were sold for paper or became mixed up with other files.” Today the Vatican possesses “around 4,500 volumes, of which only a small part refer to the heresy trials. The rest deal with theological controversies and spiritual questions.”

A book that was never banned by the Church is Charles Darwin’s
The Origin of Species
, which is the basis of the theory of evolution. Unlike some Protestant fundamentalist churches that take the Bible literally on the subject of God creating mankind, the Earth, and the universe in seven days, the Vatican has recently stated that it is possible that some species, with the assistance of a higher power, were able to evolve into the species that exist in the world today.

Reporting on the opening of an exhibit of Vatican Archive material in 2008,
Newsweek
magazine noted that the display included “documents about the Church’s restrictions on the movement of Jews, instructions for persecuting Protestants…. There were 18th-century maps outlining theghettos of Rome, Ancona and Ferrara, depicting where Jews could live in pink or yellow and where they were allowed to keep businesses in blue. There were documents with handwritten regulations describing when Jewish women could be out of the gated areas and what they could wear. There were sketches of prisons and extensive lists of banned books and written edicts…. One from 1611 outlined how inquisitors should com-port themselves both on the job and off and an illustration showing what their children should wear to school and to the beach. Investigators were even told what pajamas were acceptable.

“Other documents targeted game hunters and fishermen who were thought to be poaching from Vatican grounds. And then there’s a gemencrusted pastoral staff taken in the nineteenth century from a man who was condemned to death for claiming he was a saint. Inquisitors had authority in areas ranging from iconography and the way images of saints and prelates could be portrayed.

“This wasn’t the first time that the Church tried to show that the judges of the Inquisition were not as brutal as previously believed. In 2004, the Vatican published an 800-page report claiming that of those investigated as heretics by the notorious Spanish Inquisition, which was independent of Rome in the fifteenth century, only 1.8 percent of the accused were actually executed. Nonetheless, Pope John Paul II referred to the Church’s 700-year campaign against heresy as a ‘tormented phase’ and the ‘greatest error in the Church’s history.’”

One book that was not banned was the classic nineteenth-century novel
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
by Harriet Beecher Stowe. While it was being scrutinized by inquisitors in Rome, who formed a department known as the Sacred Congregation of the Index, one of the Vatican readers considered the story of slavery in the United States to be a coded appeal for revolution. When a second opinion on the book was sought from other inquisitors, they did not consider it harmful and no ban was ever pronounced.

Prior to World War II, “Adolf Hitler’s hate-filled
Mein Kampf
was also never put on the Index…. The censors pondered what to do about the Nazi dictator, with the discussions in the office going on for years.” In the end, examination of
Mein Kampf
was simply terminated.

More recently, letters sent by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger to a German literary critic discussed the Harry Potter novels. “In March 2003, a month after the English press throughout the world falsely proclaimed that Pope John Paul II approved of Harry Potter, the man who was to become his successor sent a letter to a Gabriele Kuby outlining his agreement with her opposition to J. K. Rowling’s offerings” as “morally unhealthy reading” for children. On the issue of
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood
, “in a letter on March 7, 2003, Cardinal Ratzinger, thanked Kuby for her ‘instructive’ book (titled
Harry Potter: Good or Evil?
), in which Kuby stated the Potter books corrupted the hearts of the young, preventing them from developing a properly ordered sense of good and evil, thus harming their relationship with God while that relationship is still in its infancy. ‘It is good, that you enlighten people about Harry Potter, because those are subtle seductions, which act unnoticed and by this deeply distort Christianity in the soul, before it can grow properly,’ wrote Ratzinger.

“The letter also encouraged Kuby to send her book on Potter to a prelate who had quipped about Potter during a press briefing which led to the false press about the Vatican support of Potter. At a Vatican press conference to present a study document on the New Age in April 2003,…Fr. Peter Fleetwood made a positive comment on the Harry Potter books in response to a question from a reporter. This resulted in headlines such as
POPE APPROVES POTTER
(
Toronto Star
),
POPE STICKS UP FOR POTTER BOOKS
(
BBC Newsround
), and
HARRY POTTER IS OKAY WITH THE PONTIFF
(
Chicago Sun Times
).”

Largely because Dan Brown’s
The Da Vinci Code
presented a tale of an investigation into a centuries-old conspiracy by the Church and Crusaders known as the Knights Templar to keep a secret about Jesus, that if revealed would shake the foundations of Christianity, nothing in the Vatican Secret Archives has been more fascinating to millions of people around the world than finding out what lies within the archives about the notorious knights.

N
o pope has had a longer-lasting influence on the course of world history than Urban II. Today’s conflict between Christianity-based democracies of the Western world and Middle East Islamic-fundamentalist terrorists can be traced to his appeal to Christian princes in Europe for a crusade to rescue the Holy Land from Muslims.

“In the speech given at the Council of Clermont in France, on November 27, 1095, he combined the ideas of making a pilgrimage to the Holy Land with that of waging a holy war…. He declared, ‘The noblerace of Franks (French) must come to the aid of their fellow Christians in the East. The infidel Turks are advancing into the heart of Eastern Christendom; Christians are being oppressed and attacked; churches and holy places are being defiled. Jerusalem is groaning under the Saracen (Muslim) yoke. The Holy Sepulchre [the church in Jerusalem that Christian tradition marks as the burial site of Christ] is in Moslem hands and has been turned into a mosque. Pilgrims are harassed and even prevented from access to the Holy Land. The West must march to the defense of the East. All should go, rich and poor alike. The Franks must stop their internal wars and squabbles. Let them go instead against the infidel and fight a righteous war. God himself will lead them, for they will be doing His work. There will be absolution and remission of sins for all who die in the service of Christ. Here they are poor and miserable sinners; there they will be rich and happy. Let none hesitate; they must march next summer. God wills it!’”

Between 1095 and 1250, there were seven crusades, but after initial success in capturing Jerusalem, the crusaders failed to hold the Holy Land. Out of these nearly two hundred years of military expeditions in the name of God by medieval warriors came such romantic figures as the real King Richard the Lionheart and the fictional knights of the round table of King Arthur’s Camelot riding forth on a quest for the Holy Grail. But it was a twenty-first-century novel that lifted a group of Crusaders from history books to popular consciousness.

Of the Knights Templar, an eyewitness, Archbishop William of Tyre, wrote in 1118 that “certain noble men of knightly rank, religious men, devoted to God and fearing him, bound themselves to Christ’s service” and promised to live “without possessions, under vows of chastity and obedience.” Their leaders were Hugues de Payens, a knight of Burgundy, and Godefroid (Geoffrey) de St. Omer, from the south of France. Because they had “no church nor any fixed abode” when they arrived in Jerusalem, they were allowed “a dwelling place near the Lord’s Temple” (the ruins of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem). Their primary duty was “protecting the roads and routes against the attacks of robbers and brigands.” This they did, William of Tyre noted, “especially in order to safeguard pilgrims.” For nine years following their founding, the Knights Templar wore secular clothing. They used “such garments as the people, for their soul’s salvation, gave them.”

Taking the name “Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon,” they became known as Templars. Sanctioned by the Church in 1128 at the Council of Troyes, they were soon renowned, and feared, for their ferocity in battle. “Following the retaking of Jerusalem by Islam in 1239, they obtained the island of Cyprus as their headquarters of the Order and used their vast accumulation of rich spoils of war to establish themselves as international financiers.” Inventing banking, they set up a Temple in Paris, becoming the medieval equivalent of today’s World Bank and World Trade Organization. Richer than any government on the continent, these former “Poor Knights of Christ” had evolved from nine members to between 15,000 and 20,000, with 9,000 manors and castles.

“They have now grown so great that there are in this Order today,” William of Tyre wrote at some time between 1170 and 1174, “about 300 knights who wear white mantles, in addition to the brothers, who are almost countless. They are said to have immense possessions both here and overseas, so that there is now not a province in the Christian world which has not bestowed upon the aforesaid brothers a portion of its goods. It is said today that their wealth is equal to the treasures of kings.”

The 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 of all the episcopal conferences, saying, “(1) the Holy See had repeatedly sought information from the bishops about contemporary Masonic activities directed against the Church; (2) there would be no new law on this matter, pending the revision of the Canon Law including Canon 2335, (3) all penal canons must be interpreted strictly, and (4) the express prohibition against Masonic membership by clerics, religious and members of secular institutes was to remain in force.’

“Many well-intentioned priests interpreted this letter…as allowing lay Catholics to become Masons if the local bishop found that the lodge in question was not actively plotting against the Catholic Church or the civil authorities. Since Canon 2335 was in force at that time, and remained in force until 1983, they should have realized that even Cardinal Šeper had no authority to allow lay Catholics to become Masons. Cardinal Šeper, on February 17, 1981, attempted to end the confusion with a formal declaration [that said] his original letter did not in any way change the force of the existing Canon 2335, and the stated canonical penalties were in no way abrogated….

“When the new Code came out in 1983, Canon 1374 stated, ‘A person who joins an association which plots against the Church is to be punished with a just penalty; one who promotes or takes office in such an association is to be punished with an interdict.’…