The popular image of Francis is of the cheerful, compassionate, avuncular Argentine who rescues refugees and celebrates his birthday by having breakfast with the homeless.

But the current Knights of Malta saga lays bare the steely, calculating side of Jorge Bergoglio: the strategic thinker who, like an expert chess player, always stays a few moves ahead of his opposition.

Take the Order of Malta whose leaders – encouraged by Francis’ most outspoken critic Cardinal Raymond Burke, the knights’ patron – defied the Pope’s instructions by sacking a knight close to the top of the organisation, Albrecht von Boeselager, in a row about the distribution of condoms. To make matters worse, when the Holy See decided to investigate the matter, it issued a series of extraordinary statements effectively telling the Pope to mind his own business.

In the end, however, the sound and fury amounted to very little. The Order’s Grand Master, the Ampleforth-educated former Sotheby’s auctioneer Matthew Festing, submitted his resignation after what must have been an uncomfortable meeting with the Pope on 24 January. There appears to be no love lost between Festing and the Pope: sources inside the knights say that during the meeting last Saturday at which the Sovereign Council of the knights accepted his resignation, Festing described the Pope as his “enemy”. Meanwhile, von Boeselager has been reinstated to his former position and all recent actions of the former Grand Master declared null and void.