Catholicism in a Campaign

[Three_Haligonians]

Just to clarify

Hey everyone,

First of all, I'd really like to thank everyone who has posted, you are all giving me loads of ideas for the campaign. I thought it might be necessary to take a moment and clarify a bit, since my first post was fairly vague. I have, already, accepted the idea of this character into my campaign. She has decided to take the stance that the lesser gods are very powerful beings, but not to be confused with gods (which, I'm sure, will provoke ire in the game from those that view them as gods). Also, she has taken to viewing her god as simalar to the greater gods' "good" (which is wonderful because its creating a nice dynamic between her and the paladin of good). This is why I'm thinking about substituting our real world Judaism (which provides the old testament for real world Catholics) for fake world "religion of good".

Please keep the ideas coming, they are really apreciated!

T from Three Haligonians

 

[dren]

"I am the Lord your god, thou shall not have no other gods before me."

Nowhere is it implied in this statement of belief that there are no other gods, just that the hebrews had only one that they were required to worship.

The basis of Catholicism or any Christian church for that matter is: A man, who was also part god, was born, preached, was crucified, was killed, and then arose from the dead. Use this as the basis of your character's faith, as rather than these events happen in the earth history but in your game world around this same belief in a messiah.

Early christian churches tended to be communes & non-politically oriented. So, your paladin could have the vows of humility, poverty, kindness, peacefulness, non-combative, and tolerance but always ready to help others. The beatitudes are a great place and should be the core faith statement for not just paladins but anyone having this catholic faith.

 

[Three_Haligonians]

ha ha!

Your campaign is screaming out for the inclusion of Cardinal Fang!

I'm thinking about including some kind of "comfy chair" artifact!

Lol!

T from Three Haligonians

 

[geezerjoe]

To allow for the Hebrew roots of the Catholic faith simply allow the character to have as part of her background access to an older set of rules and traditions towards viewing The One God. At some point these rules would have to have been reformed or revised by an individual who brings a greater understanding of that which is previously revealed. The rules and tradition of your current chruch would then have been built out of the old and the new.

 

[johnsemlak]

A product you might want to look at is Anger of Angels from Malhavoc Press by Sean Reynolds. I havne't picked it up yet, but It might provide ideas for a cosmology for you.

 

[WayneLigon]

If you can find it, check out a copy of GURPS Yrth; Yrth has many different races and cultures, along with a substancial human population drawn from several time periods of real Earth. Catholicism and Islam exist there, along with other faiths; it's interesting reading for seeing how a faith like that would mesh with a traditional fantasy world.

 

[Dogbrain]

Rather than worship any of these gods, she has decided to play a Catholic priest who worships one god only and has the attitudes and beliefs of a Catholic a few hundred years post-Christ.

Do not do it unless you know a great deal more about Christianity and its history than you let on here. Otherwise, what you will end up with will be a shallow parody, nothing better.

 

[Dogbrain]

The lesser gods, as mentioned previously, are simply Saints. I think this is the easiest way to implement your ideas.

Saints are not gods and gods are not Saints, and only those utterly ignorant of the veneration of the Saints would make claims conflating the two.

 

[Torm]

Saints are not gods and gods are not Saints, and only those utterly ignorant of the veneration of the Saints would make claims conflating the two.

Um, I don't think they were saying Saints ARE lesser gods, so much as that that would be a good way to work it for the purposes of game mechanics.

Seems to me the best way to deal with the scenario would be to have the Catholic God be the Overgod (ala AO from FR), and don't have him grant any divine magic directly AT ALL. Use the Saints for subsets of domains the Almighty grants access to. Have a point in your world's history at which a Mortal Manifestation of the Overgod played a pivotal role in saving the souls of those who live in your campaign world (maybe from a uber-lich who got WAY out of hand to the point of being worshipped himself by some, who had built some mega-soul-stealing device, or sumtin), and a belief that the world will end when that Manifestation returns to collect those who lived by His teachings. Have a head of the church that is treated as an avatar, after a manner. Have the mother of the Mortal Manifestation be revered, and have the followers of another of your religions insist that she was a representative or maybe even an avatar of their goddess.

Have two "parts" to the Church. Have one that goes about helping people and teaching the path of their Lord only. Have one that goes about helping people but strongly implying that the reason they can do so is because their God gives them these advantages, while "adopting" some elements from other faiths to convert their followers, and making the elements of those faiths that are incompatible a "heresy", justifying putting practitioners to death. The first part of the Church would be concerned by what the other part is doing, but not clear enough on the issue to put a stop to it altogether, and slowly over time some of the adopted elements are becoming mainstream for all of them. This will give you a reason why some other peoples hate them, and why some are particularly close - it depends on which "face" of the church they've seen.

Finally, have a particular other god, probably preferrably a neutral good war god, that a large number of the initial followers of the Christ-figure came from. You would then have a group of Christians who still want to follow their old war god's ways while revering the Christ, and another group who have more or less dismissed those ways in favor of only the teachings of their Messiah. These two groups work together, but sometimes resent each other some. (For extra points, have the church that insists that their goddess was involved with the mother of the Christ-figure also insist that the war god used to be a fertility goddess before her people were enslaved by some other group earlier in their history and she became he.)

 

[DonAdam]

A historical note that may or may not be helpful:

I assume, from your posts, that you're talking about "Catholic" in the sense of denying the validity of other beliefs (like pagan beliefs) and claiming to subsume, inherit, or replace another set of beliefs (like Judaism). This gives you a twofold relationship between this new faith and other faiths; some it rejects, some it adopts and transforms.

The important point here that has not been mentioned is that this replacement activity was not one-way. The majority of first century Christians were Jews, and did not stop being Jews until after the destruction of the Temple and then the Jewish council of Jamnia, when the Christians were booted out of the synagogues* (the gospel of John, many scholars postulate, was written in this context, hence the repeated use of the "cast out of the synagogue" phrase and the use of the term "the Jews."). Most scholars read Jamnia as an attempt by first century Jews to solve a sort of "identity crisis" of their religion after the destruction of the Temple, hence the desire to finally separate themselves from Christians.

*I don't think it was a formal booting out, but my memory is fuzzy. It might have had something to do with reading some anathema-like statement about Christians in the synagogues, which obviously the Christians could not participate in.

Though Christianity was distinct from regular Jewish belief before Jamnia, it was only afterwards that it became totally separate. It was not until the second century that the Marcionites would come along, claiming that the God of the Old Testament was evil and that the New Testament was about a new God.

Hope that's helpful.