Grand Commandery of New Mexico State Supplement – November 2023

By: James D. Lamb, REGC

Good Sir Knights of the New Mexico Division!

The season is upon us! Not much more time to wait for the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. I would like to remind everyone to get award nominations in. The deadline was October 31, 2024, but if you are still working on them, go ahead and submit them. I would also like to congratulate Raegan Shackelford of Albuquerque for winning the Grand Commandery Scholarship! Good luck with you studies as a nurse at the University of New Mexico. We are pleased to be able to help you along your educational journey.

As a reminder, all Grand Commandery committee reports were due last month. If you are a chairman on a committee, please submit your reports. If you do not know, I will be sending out a list of the committees. They were also posted in General Order #1.

New Mexico Commandery membership stays almost even however we have slipped just a bit lately. Normally we create as many knights as we lose. Retention is not necessarily a big problem but if you have members who, for some reason would like to leave, please contact them and see what is their motivation for leaving. We have created several new Knights at the Land of Enchantment Festival and have a few more to receive. We missed the opportunity to have candidates at the Colorado River Fall Festival in Laughlin, Nevada. Please keep up the good work and offer the chance to become a Knight Templar to any Master Mason you can. Visiting lodges in uniform is always a good idea.

Lastly, I would like to address our state contributions to the Knight Templar Eye Foundation. We heard an excellent presentation by one of the researchers at the regional meeting in Salt Lake City. A biopsy cannot be performed in the eye without destroying the tissue, leading to a guessing game of what treatment to administer. However, the fluid in the eye encompassing the possible tumor can be tested and the researcher learned this though our KTEF grant assistance. The researcher has made significant progress diagnosing eye cancer in children by taking the guessing game out of the treatment. Last year in New Mexico, two Commanderies   contributed $10 per member to the KTEF and two contributed $5 up to $9.99. I would urge that all SIX commanderies to contribute $10 per member in the coming year. Your money will be well spent! Contact the KTEF Committee Chairman Sky Olsen for more information.

Here is something to be thankful for: The Chinon Parchment 

In September 2001, a document known as the Chinon Parchment dated 17–20 August 1308 was discovered in the Vatican Archives, apparently after having been filed in the wrong place in 1628. It is a record of the trial of the Templars and shows that Clement absolved the Templars of all heresies in 1308 before formally disbanding the order in 1312, as did another Chinon Parchment dated 20 August 1308 addressed to Philip IV of France, also mentioning that all Templars that had confessed to heresy were “restored to the Sacraments and to the unity of the Church”. This other Chinon Parchment has been well known to historians, having been published in 1693 and in 1751. The current position of the Roman Catholic Church is that the medieval persecution of the Knights Templar was unjust, that nothing was inherently wrong with the order or its rule, and that Pope Clement was pressed into his actions by the magnitude of the public scandal and by the dominating influence of King Philip IV, who was Clement’s relative.