Controversy
The Knight Kadosh degree is occasionally accused of being anti-Catholic. The 1918 edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia stated that, in the ceremony in use in the Southern Jurisdiction of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite in the United States, purported to have been written by Albert Pike, the Papal tiara is trampled during the initiation. This allegation does not appear in any subsequent editions of the Catholic Encyclopedia, although it was repeated by Father William Saunders in the Arlington Catholic Herald in 1996.
Neither the Catholic Encyclopedia's nor Father Saunders' account agrees with Pike's ritual, which includes neither trampling or stabbing a skull and no mention of papal tiaras at all.
Pike's book Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry does mention hostility to the papal tiara by the historical Knights Templar when discussing the Kadosh degree; however, this is Pike's commentary on the degree and is not part of the degree itself.
Read more about this topic: Knight Kadosh
Famous quotes containing the word controversy:
“Ours was a highly activist administration, with a lot of controversy involved ... but I’m not sure that it would be inconsistent with my own political nature to do it differently if I had it to do all over again.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“And therefore, as when there is a controversy in an account, the parties must by their own accord, set up for right Reason, the Reason of some Arbitrator, or Judge, to whose sentence, they will both stand, or their controversy must either come to blows, or be undecided, for want of a right Reason constituted by Nature; so is it also in all debates of what kind soever.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)