I have recently accessed the article entitled Vatican Supports Maltese Author, which I found sufficiently intriguing to Google the book mentioned, namely Of Craft And Honour And A Templar's Chronicles, by George Gregory Buttigieg. The book's website (www.ofcraftandhonour.com/) turned up among other information.

Accessing this site, I reconfirmed that the author had written the book (though not published it) well before The Da Vinci Code's appearance as well as before Barbara Frale's public revelations of the Chinon Parchment.

I ordered the book from amazon.com and I admit to being badly hooked enough to finish it in three days. I enjoyed it thoroughly and I was quite impressed that Dr Buttigieg's Templars truly conform to the picture we now have emerging from the Chinon document.

I can now appreciate Malcolm Barber's comments about the difference between Dr Buttigieg's Templars and Dan Brown's Templars. I found this description so eerily accurate, that I started wondering if the author could have had "private" knowledge of the Chinon Parchment before it was revealed to public scrutiny.

And then small bits of the puzzle started floating in my mind. We are told that Dr Buttigieg is a Hospitaller Knight of rank, decorated with the Commander's Cross, as well as also being a diplomat for his country to the Order's Rome headquarters and the Vatican.

Could it be that the author's uncannily correct description of his Templars is based on information he was privy to as a knight or as a diplomat? Could he have been told about the Chinon document by Dr Frale or someone else whom he encountered in the "corridors of power"? More fascinatingly still, could he have had some access to other, still private documents, which, like the Chinon Parchment, have not been made public yet?

Another possible line of thinking took me down another alleyway. Could Of Craft And Honour And A Templar's Chronicles and the release of the Chinon document be part of the establishment's timely reaction to the modern heresies threatening the Catholic Church in the wake of books like The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail and The Da Vinci Code?

Dr Buttigieg has strongly denied any secret agenda but he does come down strongly against the "new" heresies about Jesus's bloodline continuing through the Magdalene. In fact, his creation - Henry Tonna Black - a third degree freemason, states that such nonsense demeans the "templarism" within the folds of the "Craft". Incidentally and interesting enough, Dr Buttigieg coins a new related term "speculative neo-templarism" but that is another matter.

Although never a great believer of conspiracy theories, I admit to toying seriously with the above. The alternative - accepting Dr Buttigieg's predictions - may be rather scary. Besides, correctly portraying the Templars' individual human weaknesses versus collective heresy, he also predicts the assassination of the President of Pakistan and the Russian Bear's new aggressive awakening. Hopefully, time will not fulfil these predictions!