Today, now, in this instance, The Knights Templar are to be admired?
I would say so, absolutely. I hold the templars in very high regard. They were the Special Forces of their day. They also built the first system of what amounts to "travelers' checques" in the world.
Traveling with money was a very dangerous proposition back then. Thieves were everywhere. But what a traveler could do was to deposit a sum of money with their local Templar office, which in return they would get an encrypted document that could only be decrpyted at another Templar office. They would go on their journey and visit the local Templar office when they got to their destination, present the encrypted document... and get their cash paid out on that end. I don't know, but I would assume that the encrypted document included some kind of description and positive ID of the true owner of the deposit. This made the document useless to anyone but the rightful owner, and let many people travel without having to risk losing all their money to robbers.
Ingenious, that. They invented the travelers' check.
Yes, the Knights are always to be admired.