Re: Priests in Space! [was nomenclature etc.]

Donogh McCarthy wrote:

> >Has anybody thought of having catholic church in space? (mounting a
>holy
> >crusaide against the heathens).
>
> You mean Endymion - certainly - although from the flavour of the text,
it'd
> be better off in a more detailed system, the B5 system maybe

Useless trivia: The Crusades were the result of a confluence of events,
the
most important of which was a high birthrate among the landed nobles (in
much
the same way that WWI was the result of a twenty year arms race).  To be
a
knight, you had to have enough wealth (usually land) to support a
warhorse.
These horses weighed in at 3000 lbs and they ate a lot.  At his death,
the
estate was divided among the surviving sons, but in the lower rungs of
the
nobility, the land was too small to be divided, and even at the higher
levels,
dillution was a problem.

When pilgrims to Jerusalem came back with tales of abuse at the hands of
the
Seljuk turks, a solution to an overpopulation of feudal lords appeared. 
The
knights would go and liberate Jerusalem from infidel hands, and would
solve the
land dillution problem in one of two ways.  The first is to wrest
control of
turk held lands and carve their own fiefdoms, or die in the attempt.

It was sanctioned by the pope, if only to get restive knights out of
europe and
stop the persecution of christian pilgrims.  The Church's grand mission
is to