When a Brother passes away, his family often has no idea what the dozens of jewels, pins, certificates, aprons, swords, hats and other keepsakes found in a drawer, cigar box or attic trunk really meant to their departed relative, or to the fraternity as a whole. They frequently become nothing more than gimcrack to be unceremoniously sent to the trash, or put out on Ebay to generate a few dollars. In many cases, they are far more important to the departed Brother's lodge or appendant chapter than any monetary price they can fetch, in terms of keeping our heritage alive.

Most of us over 50 at some point have the uncomfortable "If something happens to me" discussion with a member of our family (or we should, anyway), and most Masons at least mention the desire to be buried with our white lambskin apron. Perhaps the simplest way to let our families know not to simply send our other treasured ephemera to the dump is to put a note in storage with our apron. There are lodges that have a tradition of passing along rings from departed brethren to new members or WMs, and PM jewels passed along to the next generation of lodge leaders are a far more meaningful connection to our history than just an aging photo on the wall of the dining room.

Brother Seth Anthony in Pennsylvania was presented with a frustrating situation a few days ago, and for anyone who feels a responsibility to preserve our Masonic heritage, it can be a heartbreaker.

From Who cares about history?

Yesterday I was presented with an item of immeasurable historical importance to Pennsylvania DeMolay. There, on my screen, was the DeMolay Founder's Cross, given to Paul Miller Moore by "Dad" Land himself!

For those who don't know, the Founder's Cross is the rarest DeMolay honor ever given. It was only given by "Dad" Land to persons he desired to honor "for their personal, consistent and conspicuous loyalty to him." The jewel was to be worn over the heart. This was not a Grand or Supreme Council honor-- it was a personal expression of "Dad" Land's heartfelt gratitude. Exactly 135 were given out in his lifetime between 1937 and 1959, and they are never to be issued again. We have never seen a published list of all 135 recipients, and an extensive search of the internet only yielded the names of only a few recipients; James A. Wieland of Pittsburgh, PA; Paul Miller More of Butler, PA; Roy "Friday" Fitzgerald of Kansas City, MO; and Gorman A. McBride, of Kansas City, MO, the First Master Councilor of the Mother Chapter and the only one of the nine original members to be so honored.


In this case, "Dad" Land gave the honor to "Dad" Paul Miller Moore, a Past Grand Commander of Knights Templar of Pennsylvania, and Most Eminent Past Grand Master of the Grand Encampment of Knights Templar of the United States of America. "Dad" Moore was VERY prominent Freemason in Pennsylvania and even has a Legion of Honor Preceptory named after him (which meets in Butler.) To see "Dad" Moore's Founder's Cross for sale on eBay made my heart sink.

Somehow this important piece of PA DeMolay history made its way into the hands of an antique dealer in Pittsburgh who sold the item off to the highest bidder. PA DeMolay placed a bid on the item, which was close, but, sadly, wasn't high enough to purchase it. Unfortunately we don't know who the winning bidder was. We can only hope that it's a member of the DeMolay family. However, it's also possible that the buyer wasn't part of the Masonic fraternity. Experience has taught us that when pieces of history, like this medal, fall into hands outside of the fraternity it is very unlikely that we will ever get them back.

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AS AN APPEAL - if you are the buyer of the Paul Moore Founder's Cross, or you know who the purchaser is, we would greatly appreciate you contacting us at webmaster@pademolay.org or pa.demolay@gmail.com. PA DeMolay is willing to negotiate a fair settlement for the acquisition of this unique medal and piece of PA DeMolay history, to be displayed for all Pennsylvania DeMolay members to see.

While the organization founded in 1919 by Frank S. Land that has become DeMolay International was officially formed on March 24th of that year, longstanding tradition holds that it is more appropriately celebrated on March 18th, the date of the death of Jacques de Molay in Paris in 1314.

Heck, even the French can't agree on the exact date of de Molay's burning—plaques at the site say both March 11th and March 18th.

I am proud to be an Honorary DeMolay Legionnaire, and happily celebrate the 92nd traditional anniversary of the founding of the Order of DeMolay in Kansas City, Missouri. DeMolay is open to young men between the ages of 12 and 21, with more than 1,000 chapters all around the world. Read the history of this tremendous group here.

I don't come from a Masonic family, and I never had the opportunity to join DeMolay as a young man. I wish that I had, and wholeheartedly recommend it to young men who seek a group in which to make new friendships, learn leadership and trust, and most of all, to fulfill a quest for the code of chivalry that has inspired the very best of men for centuries. That is no idle boast.

BTW, the Jacques DeMolay Bobblehead above was created by the lads of Pennsylvania DeMolay. Note the sneaky Pope lurking in the shaows to the left.

This Friday, March 18th is the 697th Anniversary of death of Jacques de Molay, last Grand Master of the Poor Fellow Soldiers of Christ, the Knights Templar. (Some accounts say March 11th. Even the two commemorative plaques at the execution site in Paris have conflicting dates.)

He was born in the eastern French village of Molay in 1244 or 45. Almost nothing is known of his early life, but he joined the Templars at the age of 21, and served 42 years as a warrior monk.

In 1291, the Holy Land fell back into the hands of the infidel, and would never fully return to Christian rule. The Templars and the Knights Hospitallers fell back to the coastal city of Acre, which was quickly lost. Both orders subsequently went to the island of Cyprus. The Templars remained here, while the Hospitallers later took the island of Rhodes. That too would be lost eventually, and the Hospitallers eventually settled in Malta, where they became known as the knights of Malta. In spite of the modern Masonic orders that unite these two orders of knights, they were bitter rivals for the wealth and favor of Europe and the Church.

Jacques de Molay was elected Grand Master in 1293 at the age of 47. Immediately he set off to England, France, Aragon and Italy to drum up support for a new crusade to the Holy Land, as well as to fend off a growing call for merging the two orders of knights. Politiucally, the Templars were regarded as the men who lost the Holy Land, and monarchies were becoming distrustful of them. France in particular was feeling overrun with returning, aging knights, who still were free from any kind of taxation or even civil laws, by virtue of Papal bulls that held the order above anyone but the Pope.

King Phillip IV of France and his personal henchman Guillaume de Nogaret had been in severe conflict with the then-reigning pope, Boniface VIII. The pope had declared that the king of France had no right to tax Church property, and the king had, obviously, disagreed. De Nogaret kidnapped an important French bishop, and the pope had come out swinging over it. He issued a papal bull proclaiming that kings must be subordinate to the Church, and that popes held ultimate authority over both spiritual and temporal matters on earth. To make sure they got the message, Boniface excommunicated Phillip and de Nogaret. Phillip answered his challenge by sending the brutal, devious and bad-tempered de Nogaret at the head of an army to meet up with Italian allies and capture the pope. Boniface was indeed kidnapped and held for three days. After literally being beaten to a pulp, he was released and died a month later. The French king had proved just who was subordinate to whom, and he didn’t mind a little papal blood on his hands. Pope Boniface’s successor, Pope Benedict XI, lasted only a year in office, poisoned, it was said, by de Nogaret.

But there had been diplomatic difficulties to suffer for killing two popes. Consequently, King Phillip decided it would be easier to just buy one. He began procuring cardinals, pulling strings behind the scenes until the number of French cardinals in the Vatican’s College of Cardinals was equal to the Italian ones. They then obligingly elected his handpicked candidate, Bertrand de Goth, making him Pope Clement V. The city of Rome was in turmoil, and the safety of the Vatican was in question. So, it didn’t take much to convince the new French pope that his life would be in serious danger by living there. Clement obliged by staying in France, having his ceremony of investiture in Lyons. He remained in France, eventually moving the Holy See to the city of Avignon (which was actually owned by the King of Sicily at the time) in 1309, right on Phillip’s back door step, where he built a new papal palace. Catholics often refer to it as the “Babylonian Captivity.” Nowadays it’s usually called the Avignon Papacy or the Great Schism.

Clement had everything Phillip wanted in a pope: he was puny, weak, new in the job, and owed everything to his French king. Now was the time for the boldest move of Phillip’s reign – the arrest of the Knights Templar.

Jacques de Molay left Cyprus to head straight for a meeting with the new Pope, and he had high hopes for success, especially since they were countrymen. He couldn’t at this point have known of the dark forces that were assembling against him behind the scenes. In June of 1307, de Molay rode into Paris at the head of a column of his knights, with a dozen horses laden with gold and silver, to begin the financing the new Crusade. For the next several months, Phillip treated the aging Grand Master with interest and diplomacy, and de Molay believed he and the Order were at a new turning point.

The circumstances of the arrests on October 13th, 1307, and seven years of trials of the Templars are well known to most of us, but we are most concerned with the last Grand Master tonight. By 1314, both the pope and public opinion had abandoned the Knights Templar. The four senior Templar officers in Phillip’s custody had been waiting in prison for seven grim years. All of them were old, the youngest being Geoffroi de Charney, who was almost 60. Jacques de Molay was in his 70s, and had spent four years in solitary confinement.

On March 18th, 1314, the four men were finally led onto a platform in front of Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral to hear the charges and make their public confessions. The charges were read, and two of the men accepted their fate of perpetual imprisonment and were led away.

But Jacques de Molay, and his trusted follower Geoffroi de Charney, did not follow suit. Weakened with age and imprisonment, de Molay shouted in a voice that startled the assembly that he and the Templars were innocent of all the charges. They were returned to their cells at once, while Phillip called together his council and quickly pronounced sentence, using the insane logic of the Inquisition; if they had recanted their confessions, then they were considered “relapsed heretics,” and the penalty was the stake.

Late that afternoon, de Molay and de Charney were led to the place of execution, which was a tiny isolated island adjacent to the Isle de la Citè, called the Ile-des-Juifs, the “Island of the Jews.” The condemned men could see Notre Dame Cathedral in the east, but the site was not chosen for their view. Rather, it was chosen so that King Phillip could enjoy the entertainment without leaving his palace just across the River Seine.

Each man was stripped down to his shirt and tied to the stake. Jacques de Molay, with unbelievable courage, asked not only that he be turned to face the Cathedral, but that his hands be freed, so that he could die at prayer. His request was granted. The two men were roasted alive by the Inquisitional method that began slowly with hot coals, so that their agony could be prolonged as much as possible.


When the Pont Neuf was built, the Île des Juifs was joined to the rest of the Île de la Cité, and today there are not one but two plaques near the bridge to commemorate this event. According to legend, Jacques de Molay did not go to his God in silence. Instead, he died defiantly shouting his innocence and that of the Templars, calling on King Phillip and Pope Clement to meet him before the throne of God in one year’s time, where they would all be judged together. Creepily enough, both men, relatively young, would be dead within the year. One month after the death of de Molay, Pope Clement V, age 54, died, it was said of cancer. Phillip the Fair, age 46, would die in a hunting accident probably brought on by a stroke. He died on November 29th.

A non-Masonic order of modern Knights Templar claim deMolay appointed a successor to himself secretly, and the order survived the centuries. Masonic Templars make no such claim, but the Sovereign Military Order of the Temple of Jerusalem tells the tale that DeMolay’s skull and leg bones were pulled from the ashes and secretly buried with the document of succession, called the Larmenius Charter. Others claim that during the French revolution, as King Louis XVI’s head was chopped off by the guillotine, someone rushed up from the crowd and proclaimed, “Jacques De Molay, Thou art avenged!”

The gruesome death of Jacques de Molay is the last act of the Templar story. At least, the last act of the accepted, scholarly story of the Knights Templar that is told, in names and dates, between the covers of the history books. But in reality, his death is only the beginning. It’s the beginning of the myth of the Knights Templar, which is the maelstrom around which an endless stream of fact blended with speculation swirls, unabated.

(Adapted from The Templar Code For Dummies)