Forty men tauten - differently:
Howard moistens lips;
O'Bannion crosses himself;
Wright whispers to Rogers;
Yule clamps fists -
- and there are thirty-six others.
Religious gestures persist. In Merseyside, when I told a neighbour of another neighbour's death, she crossed herself.
In After Doomsday, very few human beings survive - and Donnan has just lost ten men. How many religious traditions will survive? If there are no ordained Catholic priests in any of the exploratory spaceships, then the Apostolic succession is lost. Has the new Covenant ended if Earth, Jerusalem and Rome are no more? If such questions are still discussed - and they might not be -, then we can guarantee that different answers will be given. Catholics without priests can practice only two sacraments: baptism and matrimony. But, for religion more generally, it is always possible either to pray or to meditate.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
True, what you said about Catholicism, assuming the scenario you suggested. But I also believe what Christ said in Matthew 16, both about the authority conferred on Peter (and his successors) and how He would always be with His Church. Meaning I believe both the apostolic succession and the line of the popes would survive.
In SF we see exactly that at the very end of Walter Miller's A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ. The last spaceship leaving an Earth ravaged by nuclear war includes cardinals who would establish the Papacy and episcopate on other worlds (the then reigning pope preferred to die on Earth).
Ad astra! Sean
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