Few if any institutions fuse social standing with spirituality quite like the Knights of Malta, the oldest chivalric order in the Roman Catholic Church. But that does not insulate the knights – whose past presidents have included the 5th Earl of Gainsborough and Prince Rupert Loewenstein, financial adviser to the Rolling Stones – from the trials and tribulations which afflict their less exalted contemporaries. Indeed, the knights are, in some respects even more vulnerable, as many of them are ruefully acknowledging, following what I can disclose is the abrupt resignation of one of their most senior figures. The Grand Prior leads a part…
