The Order of the Knights Templar was founded in Jerusalem in 1118 to protect Christian pilgrims and defend the Christian presence in the Holy Land.

It was suppressed by Pope Clement V in 1312, following accusations of heresy against its members, and subsequently became the focus of legends and mysteries, most recently the outrageously innacurate Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown.

This month, the Vatican Secret Archives is publishing a collector’s edition of documents on the Knights Templar, including a large folio discovered six years ago that reports on the early phase of Pope Clement’s investigation during which he apparently absolved the knights of heretical charges.

Register Correspondent Edward Pentin spoke last month in Rome with Patrick Rae, a former brigadier general in the U.S. Army Reserve who serves as Grand Commander of the Knights Templar.

The Knights Templar have often been surrounded in mystery. Please could you tell us a little about the society as it exists today?

The Knights Templar itself was suspended in the 14th century, reconstituted as a French order under Napoleon (it was originally a French order), and from that day until today it has existed, an unbroken string.

Our primary mission is to assist Christians at risk any place in the world. We have secondary missions in the humanitarian area and the interfaith area.

We are a United Nations NGO and have “consultative status,” which means that we appoint and have permanent representatives in Geneva, Vienna and New York City.

We also appoint delegates to a wide range of the United Nations conferences — usually about 150 delegates.

Do you have Catholic members in today’s Knights Templar?

We have about 5,400 knights and dames around the world and about 50% of those are Roman Catholic. The others are all from the other Christian faiths.

What do the Knights do in the area of charitable activities?

I’ll try to cover three areas that we find important. First, there is a tremendous emphasis and focus on the Holy Land. So, on an annual basis, we send funding to the primary Christian faiths of the Holy Land.

We also individually fund various activities in the Holy Land. Our primary thrust is to the Franciscan Order, and through that order to the people of the Holy Land and specifically in and around Jerusalem.

Another area is that, after the fall of the Iron Curtain, we immediately extended a hand to the Russian Orthodox Church and raised funds to help reconstruct Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow. Following that, we raised all the funds necessary to develop a Christian train in the northern part of Russia … moving throughout Russia and evangelizing Christianity to the folks of northern Russia who had been denied that contact for five decades. We built the train; we do not provide anyone on it.

The Knights Templar have had a controversial image in the past. How much of the controversies surrounding the Templars are true?

All of us in the Western world have to recognize that the Crusades now carry with them a burden of explaining not the good alone, but the bad, the excesses. And sometimes those excesses are painful reminders that we were not always acting in the finest traditions of our faith.

The Templars themselves were not a crusading order. They came after the Crusades. But definitely in the Holy Land, their founding and use was directly associated with the Latin Patriarch of the Holy Land, and of course the Christian kings.

When the Christian kingdom was removed, the Templars came back to Europe and basically were a military force, more at the disposal of the papacy than for anyone else. That created its own friction. And a number of nation states felt that having a military force sitting around that wasn’t directly responsible to them wasn’t acceptable either.

The Templars have often come in for bad press, most recently in Dan Brown’s potboiler, The Da Vinci Code. What’s your view of this attention?

Well, certainly The Da Vinci Code and a few other very popular books and movies over the last few years have had the effect of raising interest in the order. And yes, I have received more than a few phone calls from the media around the world asking any number of questions, including where is the Ark of the Covenant — which I didn’t have handy at the time — or any of the other things that we are historically chartered with having protected.

At first, it was a bit of a burden. Now it creates as much interest as it does a burden. And it usually will start a discussion, so maybe there is something to be said for that.

Edward Pentin

writes from Rome.