Knights Templar Hid the Shroud of Turin

The Times reported earlier this year that the Knights Templar hid and secretly venerated The Holy Shroud of Turin for more than 100 years after the Fourth Crusade. The Vatican made the announcement in April, apparently clearing up the mystery where the shroud had been after the sack of Constantinople in 1204.

The shroud, long revered as the shroud in which Jesus was buried, is now stored in the royal chapel of Turin Cathedral. Barbara Frale, a researcher in the Vatican Secret Archives, found a document in which Arnaut Sabbatier, a 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.

The Knights Templar had been accused of sodomy and worshipping idols, in particular a “bearded figure” - the Shroud. According to the Times,

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. [Frale] said her discovery vindicated a theory first put forward by the British historian Ian Wilson in 1978...

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 realizing 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...

After the sack of Constantinople [the shroud] 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.