Re: Catholics in Space!

Laserlight wrote:

> From: Richard and Emily Bell <rlbell@sympatico.ca>
> > Hordes of starships stamping out heresy is a Puritan (protestant)
> thing, more
> > likely to spring from a tightly knit group of born-again christians,
> than from
> > Roman Catholics.
>
> Beg your pardon?  The Catholic Church preached the original crusades
> right after Manzikert, and continued to stamp out heretics (eg the
> Albigensians) for quite a while.  The Papal States sent ships to
> Lepanto and IIRC had their own troops until mid 1800's or so.

The power of the Papacy went into a nosedive once there was more than
one
christian church in western europe.  Once Martin Luther's ninety-nine
theses were nailed to that door, the temporal power of the Papacy was
doomed.  The Vatican City does have a small self-defence force of Swiss
troops (formerly mercenaries, but now the volunteers from the Swiss
army)
[useless trivia: by treaty, the Pope's Swiss guard are the only swiss
men-at-arms allowed outside the border of Switzerland].  If stardrives
had
been invented in the fifteenth century, ravaging spacefleets bent on
exterminating heresy were possible, but the succeeding centuries did not
leave the Church with the strength to field large forces of any sort.