Holy Vatican See
25-03-2004, 07:58
This is OOC “Logistics” post to set up the Conclave--
For those who have been following our particular multiverse version of the Holy Vatican See, this post (and thread) is for OOC preparations/instructions/discussions to keep the Conclave thread running smoothly. (In other words, this is a —possibly futile— attempt to limit the amount of OOC that will go down in the Conclave thread itself, which I’ll put up tomorrow or Friday.)
For those who haven’t been following events so far but think they might be interested in participation, please see these threads:
ATTN: Catholic Nations – Upcoming Conclave!
http://www.nationstates.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=121698&highlight=
Cardinals Gather for Sixtus VI’s Final Consistory
http://www.nationstates.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=122417&highlight=
Sede Vacante: The Death of Pope Sixtus VI
http://www.nationstates.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=129082&highlight=
TG the Holy Vatican See to indicate your interest and get the go-ahead.
The Conclave thread will start with a couple of background posts, and the cue for participants to declare themselves present will be when the Governor of the Conclave (Cardinal Esteban, everybody likes him but he’s too old to be Pope, just barely within the age limit for voting,) prepares to administer the Oath to the Conclavists.
At that point we’ll let the RP run for a couple of days to make sure everyone’s aboard. If you’re a “Conclavist”—that is, a nation with a Cardinal(s) character(s) already established in the previous threads or a last-minute addition cleared via TG; have your Cardinal(s) show up and take the Oath. There’ll be plenty of background to work with.
If you’re not a “Conclavist” but are an observer, diplomat, security force, journalist, etc., please take this opportunity to post some kind of “present and accounted for” post so we know who your chars are and what they are up to.
When most of the Usual Suspects are present, we’ll tally-ho.
Those who read the ATTN: thread with care will already know this information, but we’d like to reiterate the most critical material for those who’ve missed it or lost track over the intervening RP’s:
Electing a New Pope
…let us discuss what we had in mind for the Conclave RP.
Well, first, since this NS is “the Vatican,” it means that we have to RP the Holy Father, so the participants will vote for a character presented by the Holy Vatican See. BUT.
We will observe these conventions in the creation of “candidates” for Pope, to give the participants real choice, and real influence on how we will play the Holy Father and the Vatican. That’s the whole point of this RP, we will play it based on a Church composed of the Faithful (other NS participants in this scenario) and influenced by their leadership.
Yes, you’ll have to trust us on this. But it wouldn’t be any fun if we didn’t play by the rules, as it were, so we’re promising here and now to do so.
….and….
Only four candidates (the four Counselors already established) will be fingered clearly as such. For RP purposes, we’ll assume that they’ve been more or less establishing leadership and support within the Church for some time.
However, based on how NS participants interact during the Consistory thread, we’ll also introduce other Cardinals who can become candidates.
(Note: In the RL Church, any Cardinal under 80 years of age may be elected Pope—any Cardinal, whether he’s been around for thirty years or just created the moment before the Pope died; whether he’s been running a big chunk of the show on display in Rome, or working quietly on a mission project in some whoever-heard-of-it developing country. But since the HVS will have to play the char, only HVS-introduced chars will be eligible.)
In the interests of keeping things objective, none of the Cardinals we will introduce will be from actual NS player nations.
….
Voting will be handled by TG, since it has to be secret, and each “ballot” will be 24 hours long. The HVS will NOT have a vote, since we are offering all the candidates.
When the new Pope is elected, we’ll install him, and if everyone has had fun and we all agree that the Pope is worth keeping and the HVS is a worthwhile addition to the NS community, we’ll ask participants to regard it as the “Real” Vatican (for NS purposes) and start participating in other threads and starting new threads of our own keeping Church business going.
If the thread gets derailed, hijacked, deteriorates into bickering, or we do not prove ourselves trustworthy to the other participants, we’ll just call it quits then and the NS multiverses can go back to having an imaginary Pope/Vatican.
Fair?
As of now the four obvious “papabile” Cardinals are Hume, di Corneliano, Renard, and Gambini. Each of them has at least one long post in the Consistory thread that gives background and character info. They were created with an eye to possible “directions” the Church might go in:
Guido Cardinal Gambini, Titular Archbishop of Albano and Vatican Secretary of State (perhaps the most powerful man in the Vatican after the Pope. Then again, perhaps not. Gambini represents the “Old Roman” faction of the College. These are the career Italian administrators and bureaucrats of the Church, whose focus is on maintaining the Church’s temporal power and influence in world affairs based on politics and money. Gambini is a Doctor of Canon Law but his real love is diplomacy and the Vatican Bank. Anything that will build the power and influence of his church, he’s probably got a finger in. Anything that threatens the power and influence of his church, he’ll (metaphorically, of course---?) hunt down and dismember.
Jean-Paul Cardinal Renard, Titular Archbishop of Calcedonia and Cardinal Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Renard is the spearhead for the reactionary “back to our roots” movement in the Church, suspicious of liberalism and ecumenicism, absolutely rigid on interpretations of Canon Law, and a stickler for the most strict orthodoxy. He’s not thrilled with the directions the Church has taken since Vatican II but enforces anything that is firmly established in Canon Law or the Magisterium, regardless. Almost fanatical in his opposition to the expansion of lay authority and participation in leadership at the diocesan level. Passes out dispensations for Tridentine Mass celebrations like candy at Christmas.
Bonaventura Eugenio Tosi Cardinal di Corneliano, Titular Archbishop of Palestrina, and Cardinal Camerlengo (he will administer the Conclave to choose the new Pope.) Corneliano sees the future of the Church as dependent on missionary expansion, especially into less-developed nations. He wants the Church to focus its vast resources on developing strong mission presences, not just theological, but medical and social advancement, where large numbers of poor and/or oppressed people need hope. Theologically, he is reasonably orthodox and closely aligned with Sixtus’ policies of mediating between progress and reaction. However, he has been known to advocate for some liberal dispensations when they will advance mission work and mission churches.
Michael Stephen Hume, Titular Archbishop of Porto Santa Rufina, and President of the Pontifical Council for InterReligious Dialogue (his See also makes him second in rank among the Cardinal Bishops and Sub-Dean of the College.) Hume is the opposite of Renard. He believes that the only long-term hope for the Church lies in steady, progressive liberalization of the Faith to broaden its appeal among the more sophisticated, tolerant, wealthy nations, and to give it moral authority in a rapidly modernizing multiverse. He believes that the laity should have more power in local Church affairs, and that the Church should be making steady progress towards the ordination of women. He has been spearheading the effort inside the Church to reform the seminary process to lower the risk of future epidemics of sexual abuse, and to rebuild the relationships between the Faithful and the Church in the wake of sexual abuse scandals in some of the industrialized nations. He’s made some enemies among the hierarchy but is extremely popular among the laymen in the more technologically advanced nations.
Please remember that this “Vatican” is based on a multiverse where:
The RP as envisioned retains the existing RL history and doctrine of the Church up through the death of Pope John Paul II on August 9th, 1998. The current Pope, Sixtus VI, was elected to succeed him on October 12th, 1998.
After this divergence from the RL history of the Church, an unspecified amount of time has passed (it depends on precisely which of the multiverses you are counting it from.)
The character of Sixtus VI's papacy (as enumerated in the RP scenario above) was mainly one of relatively conservative moderation.
We intend to play this nation very much the way the RL Church operates. You don't see the RL Church handing out reams of ex Cathedra pronouncements, declaring Crusades and Inquisitions, loudly excommunicating or anathematizing scores of people, etc. On the other hand, you DO see the Church simply refusing to recognize or lend its sanction to the more bizarro manifestations and perversions of doctrine, quietly slapping an internal gag on the more wacko advocates of extremist interpretations of doctrine, etc.
This Church will continue to tread the same line the RL Church is treading between the various factions within militating for liberalization or returns to more conservative interpretations, between the church's internal spiritual responsibilities and the external temporal moral leadership required to actualize our Faith. We can see many interesting opportunities for internal/external politics creating fascinating RPs and taking the future development of the church in some surprising directions, but those directions will proceed in a natural flow from real doctrine as influenced by the RP'd events.
The RL Church studiously avoids intervention into the politics of sovereign nations, and so will this Church. That is not to say that we won't exhort the Faithful to act within the appropriate temporal parameters of their nation's politics to actualize the Christian principles of Faith, but it will be couched as the RL Church couches such exhortation-- that individual Catholics, acting lawfully as citizens of their nations, follow the dictates of their consciences and the teachings of the Church in political affairs.
As regards overtly Catholic nations, this Church will, again, interact with them the way the RL Church interacts with RL Catholic nations-- that is, they will not meddle overtly with political affairs, and will exert the influence of the Church through assisting the individuals who profess our Faith with spiritual, rather than temporal, guidance. (You don't see the Holy Father excommunicating the entire political leadership of Ireland just because they finally got around to recognizing civil divorce, do you?)
In short, the RL Church is a spiritual, rather than a temporal, authority, and this Church will be played on that same assumption. The only temporal authority we assume is over the precincts of the Holy Vatican See and the established Institutions of the Church.
Additional detail on the Conclave and Voting
We said earlier that voting would have to be by TG to maintain secrecy. While we recognize that a poll can be set up that will accept votes anonymously, there is no way to guarantee that only those “authorized” to vote will cast such votes. So we are standing by the TG method, and you’ll just have to trust us.
We also recognize (do we ever recognize, in light of recent RL events for us…) that not all players will be able to vote every day, so the votes will be calculated based on whoever votes between 00:00 and 24:00 in Zone GMT-5. A two-thirds majority (Sixtus’ instructions updated the JPII encyclical Universi Domenici Gregis to reinstate the supermajority, all other UDG provisions remain intact) is required to elect a Pope.
IOW—if we have only three people voting on a given day, and two of them want the same candidate, we will have a Pope!
However, as in RL, we will not do this entirely alone—each day we will quite literally in RL “draw from a chalice” (okay, we’ll probably use a coffee cup) the names of two “scrutators.” These will be players who are currently participating in the Conclave. We will announce the next day’s scrutators each day, and send the scrutators a summary of the results for their day. TOTALS ONLY—the votes are “anonymous” and we will treat our special knowledge of which TGs originated where and voted for whom like Confessional knowledge and we will promptly forget it entirely when the election is accomplished. But at least the scrutators will provide a double-check on the reported results from day to day, as well as lending verisimilitude, etc.
For RL background on the Conclave procedures, etc., here is a link to Universi Domenci Gregis, JPII’s Apostolic Constitution on the selection of his successor. The only substantial change Sixtus VI made to this was to reinstate the supermajority.
Please use this thread for all OOC discussions of procedure, etc!
And again, thanks to everyone who’s made it such a great RP experience so far!
For those who have been following our particular multiverse version of the Holy Vatican See, this post (and thread) is for OOC preparations/instructions/discussions to keep the Conclave thread running smoothly. (In other words, this is a —possibly futile— attempt to limit the amount of OOC that will go down in the Conclave thread itself, which I’ll put up tomorrow or Friday.)
For those who haven’t been following events so far but think they might be interested in participation, please see these threads:
ATTN: Catholic Nations – Upcoming Conclave!
http://www.nationstates.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=121698&highlight=
Cardinals Gather for Sixtus VI’s Final Consistory
http://www.nationstates.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=122417&highlight=
Sede Vacante: The Death of Pope Sixtus VI
http://www.nationstates.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=129082&highlight=
TG the Holy Vatican See to indicate your interest and get the go-ahead.
The Conclave thread will start with a couple of background posts, and the cue for participants to declare themselves present will be when the Governor of the Conclave (Cardinal Esteban, everybody likes him but he’s too old to be Pope, just barely within the age limit for voting,) prepares to administer the Oath to the Conclavists.
At that point we’ll let the RP run for a couple of days to make sure everyone’s aboard. If you’re a “Conclavist”—that is, a nation with a Cardinal(s) character(s) already established in the previous threads or a last-minute addition cleared via TG; have your Cardinal(s) show up and take the Oath. There’ll be plenty of background to work with.
If you’re not a “Conclavist” but are an observer, diplomat, security force, journalist, etc., please take this opportunity to post some kind of “present and accounted for” post so we know who your chars are and what they are up to.
When most of the Usual Suspects are present, we’ll tally-ho.
Those who read the ATTN: thread with care will already know this information, but we’d like to reiterate the most critical material for those who’ve missed it or lost track over the intervening RP’s:
Electing a New Pope
…let us discuss what we had in mind for the Conclave RP.
Well, first, since this NS is “the Vatican,” it means that we have to RP the Holy Father, so the participants will vote for a character presented by the Holy Vatican See. BUT.
We will observe these conventions in the creation of “candidates” for Pope, to give the participants real choice, and real influence on how we will play the Holy Father and the Vatican. That’s the whole point of this RP, we will play it based on a Church composed of the Faithful (other NS participants in this scenario) and influenced by their leadership.
Yes, you’ll have to trust us on this. But it wouldn’t be any fun if we didn’t play by the rules, as it were, so we’re promising here and now to do so.
….and….
Only four candidates (the four Counselors already established) will be fingered clearly as such. For RP purposes, we’ll assume that they’ve been more or less establishing leadership and support within the Church for some time.
However, based on how NS participants interact during the Consistory thread, we’ll also introduce other Cardinals who can become candidates.
(Note: In the RL Church, any Cardinal under 80 years of age may be elected Pope—any Cardinal, whether he’s been around for thirty years or just created the moment before the Pope died; whether he’s been running a big chunk of the show on display in Rome, or working quietly on a mission project in some whoever-heard-of-it developing country. But since the HVS will have to play the char, only HVS-introduced chars will be eligible.)
In the interests of keeping things objective, none of the Cardinals we will introduce will be from actual NS player nations.
….
Voting will be handled by TG, since it has to be secret, and each “ballot” will be 24 hours long. The HVS will NOT have a vote, since we are offering all the candidates.
When the new Pope is elected, we’ll install him, and if everyone has had fun and we all agree that the Pope is worth keeping and the HVS is a worthwhile addition to the NS community, we’ll ask participants to regard it as the “Real” Vatican (for NS purposes) and start participating in other threads and starting new threads of our own keeping Church business going.
If the thread gets derailed, hijacked, deteriorates into bickering, or we do not prove ourselves trustworthy to the other participants, we’ll just call it quits then and the NS multiverses can go back to having an imaginary Pope/Vatican.
Fair?
As of now the four obvious “papabile” Cardinals are Hume, di Corneliano, Renard, and Gambini. Each of them has at least one long post in the Consistory thread that gives background and character info. They were created with an eye to possible “directions” the Church might go in:
Guido Cardinal Gambini, Titular Archbishop of Albano and Vatican Secretary of State (perhaps the most powerful man in the Vatican after the Pope. Then again, perhaps not. Gambini represents the “Old Roman” faction of the College. These are the career Italian administrators and bureaucrats of the Church, whose focus is on maintaining the Church’s temporal power and influence in world affairs based on politics and money. Gambini is a Doctor of Canon Law but his real love is diplomacy and the Vatican Bank. Anything that will build the power and influence of his church, he’s probably got a finger in. Anything that threatens the power and influence of his church, he’ll (metaphorically, of course---?) hunt down and dismember.
Jean-Paul Cardinal Renard, Titular Archbishop of Calcedonia and Cardinal Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Renard is the spearhead for the reactionary “back to our roots” movement in the Church, suspicious of liberalism and ecumenicism, absolutely rigid on interpretations of Canon Law, and a stickler for the most strict orthodoxy. He’s not thrilled with the directions the Church has taken since Vatican II but enforces anything that is firmly established in Canon Law or the Magisterium, regardless. Almost fanatical in his opposition to the expansion of lay authority and participation in leadership at the diocesan level. Passes out dispensations for Tridentine Mass celebrations like candy at Christmas.
Bonaventura Eugenio Tosi Cardinal di Corneliano, Titular Archbishop of Palestrina, and Cardinal Camerlengo (he will administer the Conclave to choose the new Pope.) Corneliano sees the future of the Church as dependent on missionary expansion, especially into less-developed nations. He wants the Church to focus its vast resources on developing strong mission presences, not just theological, but medical and social advancement, where large numbers of poor and/or oppressed people need hope. Theologically, he is reasonably orthodox and closely aligned with Sixtus’ policies of mediating between progress and reaction. However, he has been known to advocate for some liberal dispensations when they will advance mission work and mission churches.
Michael Stephen Hume, Titular Archbishop of Porto Santa Rufina, and President of the Pontifical Council for InterReligious Dialogue (his See also makes him second in rank among the Cardinal Bishops and Sub-Dean of the College.) Hume is the opposite of Renard. He believes that the only long-term hope for the Church lies in steady, progressive liberalization of the Faith to broaden its appeal among the more sophisticated, tolerant, wealthy nations, and to give it moral authority in a rapidly modernizing multiverse. He believes that the laity should have more power in local Church affairs, and that the Church should be making steady progress towards the ordination of women. He has been spearheading the effort inside the Church to reform the seminary process to lower the risk of future epidemics of sexual abuse, and to rebuild the relationships between the Faithful and the Church in the wake of sexual abuse scandals in some of the industrialized nations. He’s made some enemies among the hierarchy but is extremely popular among the laymen in the more technologically advanced nations.
Please remember that this “Vatican” is based on a multiverse where:
The RP as envisioned retains the existing RL history and doctrine of the Church up through the death of Pope John Paul II on August 9th, 1998. The current Pope, Sixtus VI, was elected to succeed him on October 12th, 1998.
After this divergence from the RL history of the Church, an unspecified amount of time has passed (it depends on precisely which of the multiverses you are counting it from.)
The character of Sixtus VI's papacy (as enumerated in the RP scenario above) was mainly one of relatively conservative moderation.
We intend to play this nation very much the way the RL Church operates. You don't see the RL Church handing out reams of ex Cathedra pronouncements, declaring Crusades and Inquisitions, loudly excommunicating or anathematizing scores of people, etc. On the other hand, you DO see the Church simply refusing to recognize or lend its sanction to the more bizarro manifestations and perversions of doctrine, quietly slapping an internal gag on the more wacko advocates of extremist interpretations of doctrine, etc.
This Church will continue to tread the same line the RL Church is treading between the various factions within militating for liberalization or returns to more conservative interpretations, between the church's internal spiritual responsibilities and the external temporal moral leadership required to actualize our Faith. We can see many interesting opportunities for internal/external politics creating fascinating RPs and taking the future development of the church in some surprising directions, but those directions will proceed in a natural flow from real doctrine as influenced by the RP'd events.
The RL Church studiously avoids intervention into the politics of sovereign nations, and so will this Church. That is not to say that we won't exhort the Faithful to act within the appropriate temporal parameters of their nation's politics to actualize the Christian principles of Faith, but it will be couched as the RL Church couches such exhortation-- that individual Catholics, acting lawfully as citizens of their nations, follow the dictates of their consciences and the teachings of the Church in political affairs.
As regards overtly Catholic nations, this Church will, again, interact with them the way the RL Church interacts with RL Catholic nations-- that is, they will not meddle overtly with political affairs, and will exert the influence of the Church through assisting the individuals who profess our Faith with spiritual, rather than temporal, guidance. (You don't see the Holy Father excommunicating the entire political leadership of Ireland just because they finally got around to recognizing civil divorce, do you?)
In short, the RL Church is a spiritual, rather than a temporal, authority, and this Church will be played on that same assumption. The only temporal authority we assume is over the precincts of the Holy Vatican See and the established Institutions of the Church.
Additional detail on the Conclave and Voting
We said earlier that voting would have to be by TG to maintain secrecy. While we recognize that a poll can be set up that will accept votes anonymously, there is no way to guarantee that only those “authorized” to vote will cast such votes. So we are standing by the TG method, and you’ll just have to trust us.
We also recognize (do we ever recognize, in light of recent RL events for us…) that not all players will be able to vote every day, so the votes will be calculated based on whoever votes between 00:00 and 24:00 in Zone GMT-5. A two-thirds majority (Sixtus’ instructions updated the JPII encyclical Universi Domenici Gregis to reinstate the supermajority, all other UDG provisions remain intact) is required to elect a Pope.
IOW—if we have only three people voting on a given day, and two of them want the same candidate, we will have a Pope!
However, as in RL, we will not do this entirely alone—each day we will quite literally in RL “draw from a chalice” (okay, we’ll probably use a coffee cup) the names of two “scrutators.” These will be players who are currently participating in the Conclave. We will announce the next day’s scrutators each day, and send the scrutators a summary of the results for their day. TOTALS ONLY—the votes are “anonymous” and we will treat our special knowledge of which TGs originated where and voted for whom like Confessional knowledge and we will promptly forget it entirely when the election is accomplished. But at least the scrutators will provide a double-check on the reported results from day to day, as well as lending verisimilitude, etc.
For RL background on the Conclave procedures, etc., here is a link to Universi Domenci Gregis, JPII’s Apostolic Constitution on the selection of his successor. The only substantial change Sixtus VI made to this was to reinstate the supermajority.
Please use this thread for all OOC discussions of procedure, etc!
And again, thanks to everyone who’s made it such a great RP experience so far!