Knights Hid Holy Shroud, Vatican Says

[Lujack]

Hello, hesychios!

My understanding is that the Knights Templar … who for a couple of centuries were protecting Christian people and areas the best that they could from the Muslim hoards who were trying to overtake many regions… would have been protecting the Shroud from being captured in battle.

There are two issues with this:

1. They took it from another Christian city. The Fourth Crusade put Constantinople in more danger of falling, and there was no danger of Muslims taking that city at the time of the Fourth Crusade.
2. The Knights held lands in solidly Christian areas, including France. The hiding the shroud is strange. They could have set it to Rome, or if they wanted to keep it in the Order, they could have sent it to lands in France.

 

[East_and_West]

You are proud that Roman Catholic knights sacked (killed and raped residents, looted churches businesses and homes) Constantinople, a Christian city (and not the first nor last Christian city that particular bunch attacked), and stole precious relics? Everyone knows the shroud was stolen.

You should be ashamed.

Are you proud of all the Latins that the Byzantines massacred in Constantinople well before Constantinople was sacked?
Further, after you lost communion with the true Church, you lost any rights or claims of something that belongs to the Catholic Church.

 

[josie_L]

I don’t believe that it’s really the burial cloth. I wonder how many (what percentage) of Catholics and other Christians believe that it’s the real deal.

Kalt, how come you don’t believe it’s real? I myself believe it is.

 

[Lujack]

Are you proud of all the Latins that the Byzantines massacred in Constantinople well before Constantinople was sacked?

What are you talking about?

Further, after you lost communion with the true Church, you lost any rights or claims of something that belongs to the Catholic Church.

Why? Heck, the papal legate on the First Crusade, Bishop Adhemar Du Puy, was given a tour of Constantinople and its relics before the Crusaders embarked. He almost certainly saw the shroud then, and despite being given almost unlimited authority while on the Crusade, Adhemar made no mention of attempting to repossess the relics. Even the emissary who ordered the excommunications never suggested that the shroud be taken out of Constantinople.

No matter how hard you try, it is impossible to justify the disgraceful betrayal that the sack of Constantinople represented.

 

[josie_L]

I don’t really see how this is anything to be proud of. I agree with Lujack and Hesychios’ posts. This is probably not going to win me any friends at all, but I often think that a big stumbling block to talk of reunification with the Orthodox would exist regarding these relics, even if the two Churches were one in theology. The looted treasures of the East no more belong to the West than did the Obelisk of Axum to the Italians. The Italians eventually got the right idea and returned the Obelisk to the Ethiopians in 2003.

If only the French would give us (Italians) back the Mona Lisa.

 

[josie_L]

Hesychios, I just realized something what if the Knights hadn’t taken it, what with the Muslim conquest of Constantinople it could have very well been destroyed (just look at the Hagia Sophia). It’s just a thought, but one worth reflecting on.

 

[Lujack]

Hesychios, I just realized something what if the Knights hadn’t taken it, what with the Muslim conquest of Constantinople it could have very well been destroyed (just look at the Hagia Sophia). It’s just a thought, but one worth reflecting on.

If the Knights hadn’t taken it, true, but if there never had been a Fourth Crusade, the Muslim conquest would have been a dead letter for quite some time, at the very least.

 

[josie_L]

What are you talking about?

Why? Heck, the papal legate on the First Crusade, Bishop Adhemar Du Puy, was given a tour of Constantinople and its relics before the Crusaders embarked. He almost certainly saw the shroud then, and despite being given almost unlimited authority while on the Crusade, Adhemar made no mention of attempting to repossess the relics. Even the emissary who ordered the excommunications never suggested that the shroud be taken out of Constantinople.

No matter how hard you try, it is impossible to justify the disgraceful betrayal that the sack of Constantinople represented.

I understood that what happened in Constantinople was impart the fault of Alexios III. And please don’t take this to mean I am justifying the Crusaders actions.

P.S. By “disgraceful betrayal” you refer only to the Crusaders, not the Church.

 

[VeronicaAnne]

Offered by me for everyone’s consideration –

from The Times Online

April 6, 2009


Knights Templar hid the Shroud of Turin, says Vatican

[The Times & The Sunday Times

Medieval knights hid and secretly venerated The Holy Shroud of Turin for more than 100 years after the Crusades, the Vatican said yesterday in an announcement that appeared to solve the mystery of the relic’s missing years.

The Knights Templar, an order which was suppressed and disbanded for alleged heresy, took care of the linen cloth, which bears the image of a man with a beard, long hair and the wounds of crucifixion, according to Vatican researchers.

The Shroud, which is kept in the royal chapel of Turin Cathedral, has long been revered as the shroud in which Jesus was buried, although the image only appeared clearly in 1898 when a photographer developed a negative.

Barbara Frale, a researcher in the Vatican Secret Archives, said the Shroud had disappeared in the sack of Constantinople in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade, and did not surface again until the middle of the fourteenth century. Writing in L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, Dr Frale said its fate in those years had always puzzled historians.

However her study of the trial of the Knights Templar had brought to light a document in which Arnaut Sabbatier, a young Frenchman who entered the order in 1287, testified that as part of his initiation he was taken to “a secret place to which only the brothers of the Temple had access”. There he was shown “a long linen cloth on which was impressed the figure of a man” and instructed to venerate the image by kissing its feet three times.

Dr Frale said that among other alleged offences such as sodomy, the Knights Templar had been accused of worshipping idols, in particular a “bearded figure”. In reality however the object they had secretly venerated was the Shroud.

They had rescued it to ensure that it did not fall into the hands of heretical groups such as the Cathars, who claimed that Christ did not have a true human body, only the appearance of a man, and could therefore not have died on the Cross and been resurrected. She said her discovery vindicated a theory first put forward by the British historian Ian Wilson in 1978.

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 Pope, but when Acre fell in 1291 and the Crusaders lost their hold on the Holy Land their support faded, amid growing envy of their fortune in property and banking.

Rumours about the order’s corrupt and arcane secret ceremonies claimed that 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 and owed it money, arrested its leaders and put pressure on Pope Clement V to dissolve it.

Several knights, including the Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, were burned at the stake. Legends of the Templars’ secret rituals and lost treasures have long fascinated conspiracy theorists, and figure in The Da Vinci Code, which repeated the theory that the knights were entrusted with the Holy Grail.

In 2003 Dr Frale, the Vatican’s medieval specialist, unearthed the record of the trial of the Templars, also known as the Chinon Parchment, after realising that it had been wrongly catalogued. The parchment showed that Pope Clement V had accepted the Templars were guilty of “grave sins”, such as corruption and sexual immorality, but not 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, Dr Frale said. Last year she published for the first time 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.

Radiocarbon dating tests on the Turin Shroud in 1988 indicated that it was a medieval fake. However this had been challenged on the grounds that the dated sample was taken from an area of the shroud mended after a fire in the Middle Ages and not a part of the original cloth.

After the sack of Constantinople it was next seen at Lirey in France in 1353, when it was displayed in a local church by descendants of Geoffroy de Charney, a Templar Knight burned at the stake with Jacques de Molay.

It was moved to various European cities until it was acquired by the Savoy dynasty in Turin in the sixteenth century. Holy See property since 1983, the Shroud was last publicly exhibited in 2000, and is due to go on show again next year.

The Vatican has not declared whether it is genuine or a forgery, leaving it to believers to decide. The late John Paul II said it was “an icon of the suffering of the innocent in every age.” The self proclaimed heirs of the Knights Templar have asked the Vatican to “restore the reputation” of the disgraced order and acknowledge that assets worth some £80 million were confiscated.

The Association of the Sovereign Order of the Temple of Christ, based in Spain, said that when the order was dissolved by Pope Clement V in 1307, more than 9,000 properties, farms and commercial ventures belonging to knights were seized by the Church. 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 Times & The Sunday Times)

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On this page also are links to these pages –

Times Archive
Mystery of Turin’s acrobatic shroud interloper
Related Links
Age of shroud disputed again
Vatican plots new battle with Dan Brown

 

[Lujack]

I understood that what happened in Constantinople was impart the fault of Alexios III. And please don’t take this to mean I am justifying the Crusaders actions.

I’ve never heard where Alexius is at fault, but I’d be interested to see how.

P.S. By “disgraceful betrayal” you refer only to the Crusaders, not the Church.

Of course. The Crusaders were excommunicated for their actions. It still doesn’t make it any less of a betrayal, though.

 

[josie_L]

If the Knights hadn’t taken it, true, but if there never had been a Fourth Crusade, the Muslim conquest would have been a dead letter for quite some time, at the very least.

Actually, the conquest of Constantinople was the result of the door to the city being left unlocked. It was pure happenstance, that resulted in the downfall of Constantinople (well that and the aggressively Islamic vision Muslim Turks had for the rest of Europe)… .

P.S. Please can you elaborate further (emboldened part).

 

[josie_L]

I’ve never heard where Alexius is at fault, but I’d be interested to see how.

It had something to do with Alexios III reneging or rather incapable of paying the fees he stated he would, to the Crusaders he had hired to dethrone his Uncle.

Of course. The Crusaders were excommunicated for their actions. It still doesn’t make it any less of a betrayal, though.

I never said anything about it not being a betrayal, I only wanted to make sure you were accusing the correct perpetrators, that is all.

 

[Hesychios]

Hello josie L,

Hesychios, I just realized something what if the Knights hadn’t taken it, what with the Muslim conquest of Constantinople it could have very well been destroyed (just look at the Hagia Sophia). It’s just a thought, but one worth reflecting on.

There was a 240 years difference between the two events.

For that possibility we would have to assume that the Byzantine State would not have been able to last in any case. No one really knows. No one knows if the United States of America would last as long as the Roman Empire did.

I can think of many countries that existed in 1204AD and still exist today…England and Scotland for starts, France as well, Sweden, Denmark, China and Japan…why not the Byzantine Hellenic nation?

It is a well attested fact that the sack and occupation (lasting many decades) weakened the state critically, and even after the locals were able to drive the Latins out (after what amounted to a seventy year long civil war) they could not restore their former economic and military prospects. They even had to concede a trade monopoly to Genoa so they lost control of vital trade tariffs through their own waters. It was a crippled rump of it’s former condition, economically depressed and gradually declining to the point that the Turks were able to bypass it.

No one can accurately assess the “might haves” but only what did happen, and what did happen was very damaging to a mature Christian state that battled the Muslim for many centuries.

Michael

 

[Lujack]

josie_L:
Actually, the conquest of Constantinople was the result of the door to the city being left unlocked. It was pure happenstance, that resulted in the downfall of Constantinople (well that and the aggressively Islamic vision Muslim Turks had for the rest of Europe)… .

The Byzantines were done by that point anyway. They might have repulsed that sortie, but the city was about to be starved out. Once the Ottomans found a way around the boom and managed to blockade the city from the seaside, it was only a matter of time.

P.S. Please can you elaborate further (emboldened part).

Sure. Greece was the heart of the Ottoman Empire, and Constantinople was the most important part in the entire empire. Both were devastated by the Fourth Crusade. While the Byzantines were busy trying to kick the Latins out of Greece and rebuild their empire, the Ottomans were slowly gaining more and more old Byzantine territory. Not only that, the treasury was devastated by the crusade, hampering the Byzantine ability to hire mercenaries.

Even with all that, the Byzantines were still able to hold on for another few generations. Without the Fourth Crusade or an equivalent disaster, the Byzantine Empire would have been in excellent condition to resist the Turks. Remember, they were doing fairly well at that point, especially after the First Crusade let them regain large parts of Anatolia.

 

[josie_L]

The Byzantines were done by that point anyway. They might have repulsed that sortie, but the city was about to be starved out. Once the Ottomans found a way around the boom and managed to blockade the city from the seaside, it was only a matter of time.

But maybe they could have bought some time (while they were waiting to be starved out), who knows if they would have received help during their incarceration. Unfortunately they did not have such an opportunity as the Turks were able to enter Constantinople by an unlocked door.

Sure. Greece was the heart of the Ottoman Empire, and Constantinople was the most important part in the entire empire. Both were devastated by the Fourth Crusade. While the Byzantines were busy trying to kick the Latins out of Greece and rebuild their empire, the Ottomans were slowly gaining more and more old Byzantine territory. Not only that, the treasury was devastated by the crusade, hampering the Byzantine ability to hire mercenaries.

But the result of the sack was impart due to the fact that the crusaders were not paid by Alexios III, he who had promised (whether he was aware of this or not I’m not sure) to pay them from a treasury that did not contain the monies he required.

catholic.com/thisrock/2006/0603tbt.asp

Even with all that, the Byzantines were still able to hold on for another few generations. Without the Fourth Crusade or an equivalent disaster, the Byzantine Empire would have been in excellent condition to resist the Turks. Remember, they were doing fairly well at that point, especially after the First Crusade let them regain large parts of Anatolia.

Again, who knows, since the result of the muslim conquest of Constantinople was a result of an unlocked door.

 

[Gabriel_of_12]

** The Shroud of Turin, the 14 foot long linen cloth that many think was placed on Jesus Christ at the time of his burial, was hidden and secretly venerated by Medieval Knights for more than 100 years, the Vatican announced Sunday.
The Knights Templar, the religious order that existed for two centuries during the Crusades in the Middle Ages, took care of the cloth and kept it from falling into the hands of heretical groups, Vatican researchers said.
The cloth was kept between 1204 and the middle of the 14th century. The Shroud was moved to various European cities until it was aquired by the savoy dynasty in Turin in the 16th century. It became the property of the Vatican in 1983.
According to Dr. Barbara Frale, a researcher in the Vatican secret Archives, the Shroud had disappeared in the sack of Constantinople in 1204 during the fourth Crusade, and did not resurface again until the middle of the 14th century. And it’s this time period that the Vatican accounts for.
The Shroud is now kept in the royal chapel of the Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist in Turin, Italy. It was last publicly exhibited in 2000, and is due to go on display next year.**

This is why I am so very proud to be Catholic. Not only did the Catholic church compile the bible and kept it safe and free from error, but it also protected the Shroud of Jesus Christ so that no one could harm it. There are many things the Catholic church has done for us and non-Catholic Christians, and I just hope that they realize this.

Gabriel of 12;

I was always impressed to learn that the bones of Peter and Paul remain in the Catholic church in Rome, not to mention many other biblical Saints relics are maintained by the Catholic church.

 

[Gottle_of_Geer]

Do you know what happened in the Fourth Crusade? It was one of the most shameful moments in Christendom. The Pope was ashamed and excommunicated the Crusaders for what they did. Instead of going to Jerusalem, they went to Constantinople and destroyed it for money, smashing the bulwark of Europe that had held the line since the 600’s.

Which meant that Constantinople was not in a position to maintain its empire & borders, which meant that life was made that bit easier for the Ottomans after 1300. Which meant that the Ottomans had less trouble than they might have had in assaulting eastern Europe. ​

Regardless of how one feels about other crusades, nothing good came out of the fourth one.

If anything did - what could possibly counter as great an evil as that was ?​

As to the topic… - is it so incredible that the shroud might have been misidentified, taken in 1204, then lost ? Funny things happen sometimes. (I have no opinion on the shroud - just guessing.)

 

[SpiritMeadow]

If only the French would give us (Italians) back the Mona Lisa.

Good point. I myself have been wondering why the Vatican retains so many masterpieces of pagan sculpture of the Greek gods? Why haven’t they returned them to Athens?

 

[OneTrueCathApos]

Good point. I myself have been wondering why the Vatican retains so many masterpieces of pagan sculpture of the Greek gods? Why haven’t they returned them to Athens?

Because Athens doesn’t want them. Where in the Vatican are there any pagan sculptures of Greek Gods because I was recently there and saw none.

 

[O.S.Luke]

Sure is nice to watch for a change…