Christmas Every Day

1314 Burning of Jacques de Molay and Templar leaders

One of the most cynically evil acts in French history was the unjust prosecution of the Templar Order by King Philip IV. The enormously rich order had become the principal banker of the French monarchy, a regime which had ruthlessly squeezed all other sources of revenue. Its vast holdings and secrecy had aroused suspicion in the populace which saw that the order had lost its crusading zeal since being expelled from the Holy Land in the 1290s. This provided Philip with the opportunity of accusing the Knights of all kinds of perfidy: heresy, demon worship, sodomy, collusion with Muslim powers; 127 charges in all. The leadership of the Order was subjected to torture until they confessed to the accusations, setting the stage for a public condemnation in which they were to be sentenced to life imprisonment, but where Jacques de Molay upstaged the proceedings and regained his integrity at the cost of his life. According to a medieval account:

The cardinals dallied with their duty until 18 March 1314, when, on a scaffold in front of  Notre Dame, Jacques de Molay, Templar Grand Master, Geoffroi de Charney, Master of Normandy, Hughes de Peraud, Visitor of France, and Godefroi de Gonneville, Master of Aquitaine, were brought forth from the jail in which for nearly seven years they had lain, to receive the sentence agreed upon by the cardinals, in conjunction with the Archbishop of Sens  and some other prelates whom they had called in. Considering the offences which the culprits had confessed and confirmed, the penance imposed was in accordance with rule — that of perpetual imprisonment. The affair was supposed to be concluded when, to the dismay of the prelates and wonderment of the assembled crowd, Jacques de Molay and Geoffroi de Charney arose. They had been guilty, they said, not of the crimes imputed to them, but of basely betraying their Order to save their own lives. It was pure and holy; the charges were fictitious and the confessions false. Hastily the cardinals delivered them to the Provost of Paris, and retired to deliberate on this unexpected contingency, but they were saved all trouble. When the news was carried to Philippe he was furious. A short consultation with his council only was required. The canons pronounced that a relapsed heretic was to be burned without a hearing; the facts were notorious and no formal judgment by the papal commission need be waited for. That same day, by sunset, a pile was erected on a small island in the Seine, the Ile des Juifs, near the palace garden. There de Molay, de Charney, de Gonneville, and de Peraud were slowly burned to death, refusing all offers of pardon for retraction, and bearing their torment with a composure which won for them the reputation of martyrs among the people, who reverently collected their ashes as relics.

There is an interesting legendary postscript to these murders. As he was being incinerated, de Molay uttered a mighty curse. He laid a malediction upon King Philip, the royal advisor Guillaume de Nogaret, and Pope Clement, prophesying that they would all die with thin the year. All did. De Molay is also said to have cursed Philip’s family, and very shortly all of his sons died without heirs, leaving the dynasty extinct. These series events are recounted in Les Rois maudits (The Accursed Kings), a series of historical novels written by Maurice Druon.

St Zachary’s Day

St Zachary (679-752) was elected pope in 741 and immediately became involved in a political dispute that had long-lasting consequences in medieval church-state relations.

In the mid-8th century the situation of the papacy was perilous. Italy had been almost entirely overrun by the barbarian Lombards and the power of the Eastern Roman Empire to protect its territory in the peninsula was waning. Moreover, the papacy was at odds with the Emperor over the newly-adopted policy of iconoclasm, the pope taking the position that the Byzantine government had no right to interfere in church matters.

Fortunately Zachary proved to be an able diplomat with the ability to charm the Lombard ruling class. Not only did the pope persuade the Lombards to halt their proposed invasion but he also convinced them to return territory they had already conquered. When the Lombards seemed ready to invade the Byzantine holdings around Ravenna, it was again Zachary who saved the day.

By this time it was clear to all that the arm of the eastern empire was no longer strong enough to protect Italy from barbarian incursions and a new protector had to be found. Zachary had always interested himself in the affairs of the most powerful force in the West, the Frankish kingdom. He had encouraged St Boniface’s attempts to reform the lax and corrupt Frankish church and to extend Christianity to the pagan tribes in the German lands.

In 751 he received a letter from Frankish nobles inquiring whether the title of king belonged to the one who had exercised the power or the one with the royal lineage. This was a way of asking whether the Mayor of the Palace, Pepin the Short, who was the de facto ruler, could depose the last of the useless Merovingian dynasty, Childeric III. Zachary, who saw the Franks as the future defenders of the papacy, gave the go-ahead to the coup by replying that the one with the real power should also wear the crown. Childeric was shorn of his long hair, symbol of his kingship, and placed in a monastery. Pepin was crowned king and founded the Carolingian dynasty whose greatest ruler was Pepin’s son, Charlemagne.

In sanctioning this deposition, the papacy signalled a turning away from the Byzantine throne and a turn to the west and the Franks. This move would be given symbolic force on Christmas Day 800, when the pope crowned Charlemagne as Emperor. Pepin had unwittingly given the papacy a chance to claim that political legitimacy originated with the popes, that they could make, or unmake, kings and emperors. This is an idea that caused centuries of turmoil in Europe but which also helped firm up the notion of a church-state separation which was indispensable to the development of political theory in western Christendom. Those seeking to understand the reasons why political life developed differently in the West than in Orthodox lands or in Islam should start with Pope Zachary.

1937

“Mitt brennender Sorge”

It is with deep anxiety and growing surprise that We have long been following the painful trials of the Church and the increasing vexations which afflict those who have remained loyal in heart and action in the midst of a people that once received from St. Boniface the bright message and the Gospel of Christ and God’s Kingdom.

In 1933, after years of debate between the German Catholic Church and state, the Vatican and the new Nazi government signed a pact, or Reichskonkordat. In return for withdrawing support from German Catholic political parties or interfering in politics, the Catholic Church was guaranteed rights for their members. Many of the Germany clergy felt there was little sense in trusting Hitler but that this was the best deal they could hope for in the new political reality. One cardinal said, “With the concordat we are hanged, without the concordat we are hanged, drawn and quartered.”

The Nazis ignored the pact when it suited them and soon began eroding Catholic religious institutions, especially regarding the education of children and the existence of lay organizations. In 1937 Pope Pius XI issued a papal letter of protest called “Mitt brennender Sorge” (“With burning anxiety”), written, not in the customary Latin, but in German, meant to be delivered in all Catholic churches in the country. It claimed that the state had violated the terms of the concordat and was leading the people astray. The letter set the issue in stark terms and drew clear conclusions about the evil of Nazi religious ideology:

Take care, Venerable Brethren, that above all, faith in God, the first and irreplaceable foundation of all religion, be preserved in Germany pure and unstained. The believer in God is not he who utters the name in his speech, but he for whom this sacred word stands for a true and worthy concept of the Divinity. Whoever identifies, by pantheistic confusion, God and the universe, by either lowering God to the dimensions of the world, or raising the world to the dimensions of God, is not a believer in God. Whoever follows that so-called pre-Christian Germanic conception of substituting a dark and impersonal destiny for the personal God, denies thereby the Wisdom and Providence of God who “Reacheth from end to end mightily, and ordereth all things sweetly” (Wisdom viii. 1). Neither is he a believer in God.

 Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community – however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things – whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God; he is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds.

In the next year Pius XI spoke out more clearly on the German treatment of Jews in response to the attacks of Kristallnacht:

 No, no, I say to you it is impossible for a Christian to take part in anti-Semitism. It is inadmissible. Through Christ and in Christ we are the spiritual progeny of Abraham. Spiritually, we are all Semites.

The full text of the English translation is here http://w2.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_14031937_mit-brennender-sorge.html

2000

The pope apologizes

Pope St John Paul Paul II (1920-2005) made it a hallmark of his pontificate to apologize for sins committed by Christians  over the centuries. Among the subjects of his regrets were:

• The conquistadors’ behaviour in Latin America
• The judicial treatment of Galileo
• The sacking of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade in 1204
• Christian involvement in the African slave trade
• Failure to do enough to prevent the Jewish Holocaust
• The burning of Jan Hus by the Council of Constance in 1415

On this date in 2000 John Paul gave a homily at the Mass for Pardon in the Vatican during which he implored God’s forgiveness for the faults of all believers.

“We are asking pardon for the divisions among Christians, for the use of violence that some have committed in the service of truth, and for attitudes of mistrust and hostility assumed toward followers of other religions.”

Though no specific groups were named by the pope, cardinals speaking later in the service singled out Jews, gypsies, women and marginalized ethnic groups.

1765

Jean Calas is vindicated

In October 1761, Marc-Antoine Calas was found dead on the floor of his family home. At first, his parents claimed that the man had been murdered but then changed their story to say that they had found him hanging and, wishing to avoid the scandal of suicide, cut him down. The father, Jean Calas, a prosperous merchant of Toulouse, was arrested and charged with the murder of his son. The motive imputed to him was that the younger Calas wished to convert to Catholicism and the father, a Protestant, killed him to prevent that. To the mob and the authorities, Marc-Antoine was a Catholic martyr. Under horrible torture, Calas refused to confess and even during his execution by being broken on the wheel, he clung to the story of suicide. His body was then burnt, his daughters were forced into a convent, his wife and sons forced to flee and his property was confiscated.

The case was taken up by the philosophe Voltaire who used it as a way of attacking the Catholic Church, accusing them of perverting justice in order to kill a Protestant. Since the 1685 Edict of Fontainebleau by Louis XIV, Catholicism had been the country’s only legal religion and Huguenots (French Protestants) always worshipped and lived under a cloud. In his Traité sur la Tolerance à l’occasion de la mort de Jean Calas Voltaire excoriated the Church for its bigotry, obscurantism and fanaticism. The case became a cause célebre throughout Europe and did much to discredit religion in the eyes of those who considered themselves enlightened.

What is less well known is the reaction of the court of Louis XV. Within less than three years of the trial, the king ordered a new panel to reconsider the evidence. They voted to rehabilitate the reputation of Jean Calas and vacate the guilty sentence. Louis XV also paid restitution to the family.