The origin of the superstition of Friday the 13th began on Friday the 13th of October, 1307. King Phillip IV of Spain had borrowed a very large amount of money and personnel from the Templars, in order to wage war against the English, and when Pope Clement V sent him word that there were suspicions about the Christian nature of the Templar brotherhood, Phillip seized the opportunity, sending his men out to round up, arrest and imprison all the Templars in Spain.
Phillip accused them of the most atrocious sins imaginable for that time, including apostasy (which means renouncing Christ), heresy, idolatry and even sodomy. Any one of these “crimes†warranted death back then, and the Templars were guilty of precisely none. But Phillip saw an extraordinary chance to eradicate the Templar order from his entire country and seize its incalculable wealth for himself. He bullied Clement V with political embargoes, and Clement acquiesced with an Inquisition convened to investigate these accusations.
The “investigation†involved torturing the Templars via very perverted, horrifying methods, with the single proviso that no blood be spilled. If they died from the torture, it was deemed “righteous punishment.†But none of them did, according to the records we have. Most were put on the rack and stretched until their shoulders dislocated. Some had their testicles crushed in vises, which caused them to bleed profusely, of course, but internally. No blood was spilled. Some were shackled to the dungeon floors and had their feet roasted to the bone in furnaces.
They, understandably, confessed to all sorts of horrible offenses to the Church, including the above mentioned, along with spitting on the cross. As soon as their tortures were over, the recanted their confessions. They may have been in possession of the Shroud of Turin at this time, which constituted idolatry. Clement issued a Papal Bull on 22 November, ordering that Templars be arrested and tortured all over Europe, and they were.
Phillip IV is the most directly to blame, but the Catholic Church was officially and directly responsible in torturing and executing the Templar knights, knowing full well that they were innocent of all charges. Most of the Templars across Europe actually escaped or were acquitted, but those convicted, including the Grandmaster Jacques de Molay, were, to a man, burned at the stake, most after gruesome tortures. He is said to have screamed out of the flames that Phillip and Clement would both meet him before God, “and that right soon.†They both died within a year; Phillip had a stroke and fell off his horse while hunting; Clement died of natural causes, and a rumor persists that his body lay in state during a thunderstorm, when lightning struck the building and burned it to the ground.
[by Flamehorse,
http://listverse.com/2011/06/08/top-10-shameful-moments-in-catholic-history/This list is not a denunciation of Roman Catholicism, which dates back to Christ Himself. The Church today is a very honorable institution. But there are a few moments in its history when it did not live up to its own high moral standards. This list constitutes an honest, unflinching look at some black moments in Roman Catholic history.]
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