Catholics

Catholics During the Burning Times the thought of a world without Christ or His Church was an impossibility. Whether we believed ourselves cursed or tested, as devils or avenging angels, we were somehow a part of God’s plan, and the Church was universally seen as an embodiment of His will on earth. We had placed ourselves in relation to the doctrine of faith for centuries, and we were unable to imagine a world without Him. So as we always do, we latched onto human developments. Supported by a correspondence between the anti-clerical and 2 0 ascetic reformer Girolamo Savonarola and one of our kind, as well as the meetings between Martin Luther and Anatole, I here posit that our abandonment of faith as a sect happened gradually. Faith has always been a battleground for our Kind. Albertus Magnus and myself struggled for centuries to wrest control of the Church from the foul Arian heretic Fabrizio Ulfila, whom I hold responsible for ushering in the Burning Times. It bears remembering that initially the clergy and the papacy, not God or faith, was what we fought. the Americas was a continuation of this struggle. We followed the colonial expansion of Britain, the Dutch, the French. It was here, in a new world of Puritan witch hunts, genocide rationalised through religion, and nations founded on Enlightenment principles, not divine right, that we lost faith. At least I know that’s what happened to me. I confess that my crisis of faith lasted almost two full centuries. You could say that as we changed America, America changed us. The State and humanity After the Church lost universal power, the next great object of human worship was not religion, but the concept of the nation state. This is where we discovered our true strength as a union — our feudal principles, our hierarchy, our lineage and our ideals. We became a universal brotherhood of Kindred, a global union of city states. In the tangled web of secret societies and weird religious groups that covered the early Americas, we were everywhere. Tinfoil hats and anti-semitic hate-mongers looking for the fingerprints of “the Illuminati” in early US history will find only traces of night-wars and alliances between creatures unimaginable to their limited faculties. Their efforts are invaluable to the Masquerade, however, so bless their disgusting little confirmation-biased hearts. It’s during this time of change that humanity arose as our central ideology. The sect’s commitment to this radical idea — by adhering to what we believed in life, we turn away from the Beast — changed everything. We questioned ourselves and our impulses. We tempered our sense of superiority with humility, and found a way to instruct faithless neonates in proper conduct without resorting to arguments of damnation. Cynics state that our obsession with behaving like humans is just a way to enforce the Masquerade. I say it doesn’t matter at all if it is. The pretense makes us better, and it does help us hide. This is why my constant recommendation is to make humanity your guide and belief your strength. Study them, follow their fashions, understand where they are going morally, and adjust your old ideals to fit in with the state of the world right now. I ask you not to betray yourself, your faith and who you were, simply to find a moral