From last week's Daily Telegraph comes a story that struck me as what the result of a literary collaboration between John Grisham and Dan Brown might look like.It seems that the Knights Templar, or at least a group that claims to be the legitimate heirs of the Knights Templar, has sued Pope Benedict XVI. The lawsuit, filed by the Association of the Sovereign Order of the Temple of Christ, alleges that the Catholic hierarchy wrongly persecuted the group and illegally seized its assets.
This all occurred back in 1307.
There certainly was a group called the Knights Templar, which was founded in 1119 after the success of the First Crusade. The Knights were devoted to protecting pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem, but they also developed a lucrative side business in real estate speculation that enabled them to amass lots of property (some 9000 estates at their peak) and enormous amounts of wealth. These assets came in handy after Muslims reconquered Jerusalem, thus putting the Knights out of the pilgrim protecting business.
Unfortunately for the Knights, in the 14th century sitting on lots of real estate and giant piles of cash had a tendency to get you accused of little indiscretions such as devil worship or heresy, which in turn tended to lead to being burned at the stake. In 1307, Pope Clement V, under pressure from King Phillip IV of France, dissolved the order, executed its Grand Master and many of its members and confiscated all the assets for the King and Church.
The lawsuit, filed 701 years later, alleges that the seizure of assets was not justified and that the Church owes ASOTC somewhere around 100 billion euros ($150 billion U.S.). Aside from the obvious statute of limitations problem (presumably the Knights will argue that statute of limitations was tolled by the Vatican's suppression of the records of the "secret" Templar trials), a few other problems occurred to me as well:
First, there is a little problem with venue. The lawsuit was filed in Spain while the Templars were headquartered in Paris at the time they were dissolved and France is where the leaders of the order were executed. Moreover, Pope Clement, who was French, was so in the tank for King Phillip that he moved the papacy from Rome to Avignon in southern France where it remained for the next 68 years;
Second, since Pope Benedict wasn't around 701 years ago, he is presumably being sued in his official capacity as the head of the Catholic Church. The problem is that in that capacity, he is also a head of state (Vatican City) and is entitled to sovereign immunity for civil actions directed against his official role;
Third, it seems to me that, torture and executions aside, if the order of Knights Templar was authorized by one pope (Honorius II), it could be dissolved by another and so by definition there is no legitimate group by that name which would have standing to claim damages;
Finally, I wonder why they haven't they named the President of France in the lawsuit. It seems to me that the same logic which they are using to try to collect a hundred billion euros from the current pope would also justify a recovery from the modern successor to King Phillip who appropriated the lions share of the Templars' property for himself. Heck, every lawyer knows that when you are going after that kind of money, two deep pockets are better than one.
