I'm interested to note that a pope in the 11th century could put forward the idea that a faithless priest's actions are ineffective.
I had thought this was settled much earlier in the response to the Donatist Heresy which arose in North Africa after the persecutions of Diocletian. When the Church could emerge from hiding away the Donatists taught that the bishops and priests who handed over the sacred texts to the authorities in return for clemency had lost their priestly and episcopal powers. And therefore anyone ordained or enthroned as a bishop by one of the so called traditores wasn't a priest or bishop either.
The whole mess was still going on (to the point of rioting and burning churches) when Constantine the Great began to turn the Empire Catholic. The Donatists lost out big time.
The whole issue is quite easily resolved by the fact that there are no virtuous humans in Catholic theology. All are tainted with Original Sin and even the best are only able to struggle to follow the word of God.
How all this works with ARS MAGICA is another question and very much a judgement call. We know from the published works that in the game universe demons can tempt priests into their own damnation and that they love to corrupt holy places too but that isn't to say that the weakness of a priest invalidates the worship of the parishoners.
To be precise, Leo IX 1049 rejected on a synod the validity of the sacraments of simoniacal priests. The synod - and quickly thereafter Peter Damian - did not follow him and he soon conceded to them.
The important issue was, that the 1049 synod deliberated about priests who had - by canon law illegally - bought their holy orders in the Church, that allowed them to perform certain sacraments.
Were these sacraments tainted by the illegal way they had acquired their orders?
Leo IX was very determined to reestablish the observation of canon law in the Church.
It still runs into the same problems that declaring any priesthood invalid does: how are the poor ignorant parishoners to know if they are being married, shrived and buried by a real priest or not?
The sin involved in the simony falls on the heads of those who bought and sold God's gifts: it shouldn't fall on the heads of those who were nowhere near at the time. The bishop has performed a valid ordination for sinful reasons but we're all sinners and sin gets everywhere. Worse than soot and rats. Better to discipline and order people to monasteries afterwards than have people suddenly discover they aren't really married.
Now if the bishop who did the consecration wasn't a real bishop, lacking the apostolic succession, or if the priest is a total fraud and an imposter, that's a whole other barrel of snakes. But that's not what was being alleged here. (I don't know if we've seen the results of that in an AM scenario.)
Of course if th church ruled one way and the divine realm goes another things could get... interesting.
If the Simony priests re gotten rid of and the church assures people that the rights are still valid but the people are sitting there with no divine aura then there is no divine aura...
And here I was just trying to imagine how a SG is burned at the stake in game for ruling against the pope... unless you are suggesting players murder their SG for disagreeing with medieval papal authority...
when it comes to setting in game the pope may or may not be infallible, but the SG certainly is.
Well, first of all I have to point out that the Reformation (and the religious wars and persecutions that followed) predate 1870 by a comfortable amount.
And secondly, I wasn't saying that the Pope felt threatened by the 1049 synod. At the worst he would have felt miffed.
But if a parish somewhere started a movement that said: "Our church is tainted by Satan and that's because the bishop who consecrated it was a simoniac sinner..." Well, Luthor and Hus and all of that lot were saying things a touch less disrespectful than that.
And my point is that theology and Dominion lore are not the same ability, and that what the church ruled does not have to be what the game mechanics follow, if the divine in your world works a bit differently...
Yep. That is why the liber gratissimus was indeed gratissimus, and despite his previous book Peter Damian became a cardinal and a major figure of the Church Reform after Leo IX.
two things I have found poking around wikipedia that connect to this-
some cathedrals have relics intered in them to "saints" who were never canonized, and some may be questionable as saints. If the initial consecration relies upon such relics, presumably no dominion aura will form
Cologne rebelled against the civil authority of the church in their city for nearly 200 years. YSMV as to what impact this had on the dominion aura, but I would assume it was not beneficial...
Take a quick look at the historical development of canonization in the Western Church.
As that process changed, also the way to determine, whose relics are worthy to rest in an altar changed - but this did not affect retroactively the patrons of churches and altars, or local devotions.
The "civil authority of the Church" here describes the function of bishops as worldly lords: the possession and control of land, rights, titles and services.
Defying and rejecting this civil authority was a worldly issue, not heresy, and unlikely to affect the Dominion any more than rejecting the authority of - say - a baron. In both cases, worldly courts had to resolve the conflicts.
The point is that this inspired a point- which is to say that a church which is sanctified with false relics of whatever source (inspired by the wikipedia article) would not develop a dominion aura since the Catholic process does not independently bless the space, unlike the Muslim and Jewish consecration.
As to the civil authority the first point is this- if you are rebelling against the civil authority of the bishop, and the bishop is actively suppressing your rebellion, are you going to go to church in that Bishop's cathedral? Maybe you feel it is worth walking to the next town over, or skipping church a few weeks at a time and going to the next town over on Christmas and Easter. Rebelling against the civil authority of a bishop is likely to have a significant impact on church attendance...
