The Sad History of the Knights Templar
By: Christopher Check

On a raw March afternoon in 1314, a scaffold stood in the shadow of Notre Dame. The people of Paris knew what macabre show was imminent. Seven years before, the King’s constables had stormed all the Templar estates in France and arrested 5000 knights of the order, much to the astonishment of the people. Now the curtain was about to drop on a bizarre tragedy, one scripted by the king himself.

King Philip the Fair—grandson of St. Louis of France—had engineered the election of the pope and the relocation of the papal court to Avignon. Although the papacy may have been in the ambitious king’s pocket, one of the most powerful and wealthy institutions of the day was not: The Order of the Temple. Philip knew its vast wealth and schemed to seize it.

The arrests of the Templars in France was easy: The fighting men of the order were then on the bloody border with Islam, in Spain, and on Cyprus. The Templars in France were aged veterans of the Crusades, well into their second childhood.

The things the knights confessed under torture defied belief: trampling and urinating on the Crucifix, secret rites of obscene kisses, sodomy, usury, treason, idolatry, heresy. After the arrests came seven years of inquisition, then hundreds and hundreds of public executions by burning. In the end, Pope Clement V abolished the order.

As a large crowd closed around the scaffold, the last Master of the Knights of the Temple of Jerusalem, 70-year-old Jacques de Molay, stood alongside three of his brothers in arms, listening as the papal legate read their crimes in horrible detail. But mercy would yet be theirs if they repeated to the people of Paris the guilt they had confessed before the inquisition. Five stakes piled high with brushwood and faggots awaited them if they did not.

Two of the knights, eyes cast downward, mumbled their guilt. Then de Molay and Geoffrey de Charney of Normandy stepped forward.

"On this terrible day," shouted de Molay, his gaze meeting the eyes of the crowd, "in my final hour, I shall let truth triumph and declare, before heaven and all the saints, that I have committed the greatest of all crimes." The crowd pressed in.

"But my crime is this: that I confessed to malicious charges made against an order that is innocent so that I could escape further torture. I shall not confirm a first lie with a second. I renounce life willingly. I have no use for days of sorrow earned only by lies."

The King’s police seized the two knights and chained them to the stakes. Brush and branches were set aflame. As the old men were roasted alive, they shouted their innocence and their love for Jesus Christ before falling silent. Thus the last Master of the Knights of the Temple of Jerusalem was reduced to ashes.

A very good article wth a different point of view. read more on http://www.catholic.com/magazine/art...nights-templar