Bradford DeLong wrote:But when the Knights Templar were suppressed by Philip the Fair of France and Pope Clement V in 1307, one of the charges was that the Templars confessed only to each other and not to other priests--so that nobody outside the order knew what horrible and foul things>were going on within the order.
confession is only seven centuries old?
No. Confession is older than that. But the idea that the seal of confession could never be broken--that it could not be overridden by, say, King Philip the Fair's desire to get his hands on the Templar Treasury, or (supposing for the sake of argument that the charges against the Templars were true) by the necessities of investigating whether Templars were in fact guilty of kissing the anus of a cat, worshipping the Egyptian cat-goddess Bast, secret Muslims, open userers, secret Jews, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
The idea that the seal of confession could *never* be broken would seem to be less than seven centuries old. If it was older than that, why bother to accuse the Templars of the crime of refusing to confess to priests outside their own order?
Brad DeLong
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