The Tangled Web(4)

Ed leaned forward. "You're going to be learning a lot of new lessons. The first one is about separation of church and state. If you want the people of Fulda to be Catholic, you will have to entice them. Persuade them of the rightness of your doctrines. Feed them barbecue at revival meetings, I don't care. But you may not force them to convert. You may not compel them to hear your missionaries. All carrots, no sticks."

Schweinsberg scowled.

"Remember. They are not your subjects." Ed paused between each of those words for emphasis. "You no longer exercise legal jurisdiction over them. You are the church; the NUS is the state. I am quite sure that Mrs. Stade will be happy to explain it to you. The two of you will have plenty of time for conversation between here and the border, so she can tell you how the system works."

Clara Bachmeierin, otherwise known as Mrs. Stade, smiled blandly.

Ed Piazza continued. "There are ways that you can take advantage of our system, no doubt, but only if you work within it. If you try to go around it or subvert it, somebody in authority is going to think about the appropriate penalties for collaborating with the enemy. When you leave here, you're going to be carrying a written notification to that effect, signed by President Stearns."

Game Board

Fulda, January 1633

"Why can't they all at least be happy Catholics together?" Harlan Stull asked plaintively. He was looking at a complaint from the Franciscan Order that some sixty years before, a former abbot of Fulda had given one of their buildings, which they had abandoned and were no longer using, to the Jesuits, who still had it and were using it for a school. The Franciscans wanted it back now. The Jesuits thought that possession was nine points of the law.

"Why," Wes Jenkins said, "is not up to us Methodist good old boys to figure out. 'Ours not to reason why.' Though I sort of wish that they had sent us a couple of Catholics from Grantville to help us understand it, instead of shipping them all down into Würzburg and Bamberg. But I don't think that this is a religious problem. They're all Catholics. I hereby declare officially that it's a land title problem. Put it into Andrea's in-box and let's move on to something else."

"But," Harlan was practically wailing. "Why does it make any difference to them that the abbot and these guys who are supposed to be monks here, the chapter, are Benedictines but they squabble with these other monks who are Franciscans and who say they aren't monks but friars and both of them are jealous of the Jesuits? Aren't they all in the same bathtub together?"

"They weren't up-time," Wes pointed out. "Ed Piazza and Tino Nobili were practically in a boxing match half the time about stuff that went on at St. Vincent's, with Father Mazzare refereeing. Or trying to."

Andrea tried to think of something that would be helpful. "Think of the Middle Ages. Before the Reformation. They were all Catholics then—well, except for the Jews and Saracens—and they fought each other all the time. Remember what Melissa Mailey said about the Norman Conquest?"

"I think it's this way," Fred Pence said. "The Yankees and the Dodgers and all those other teams all played baseball, but that didn't mean that they weren't in competition with one another. For one thing, baseball was the way they made their living, so they were competing for the same pot of dough and the same fans. Like these guys. They're all playing the same game, but that doesn't mean that they're all on the same team. Sometimes they hate each other more than they do the people who play football or basketball. That's how I'm laying it out, for voter registration. The Catholics are football; the Lutherans are baseball; the Calvinists up on the border by Hesse are basketball, and the occasional oddballs are soccer and ice hockey."

Harlan stared at him.

"Well, it works," Fred protested. "Hey, guys, I'm a Nondenominational Evangelical. Or I was, when there was a church for me to go to. We don't have one in Grantville, even. I've been having to make do with the Baptists. This is even weirder for me than it is for you Methodists. But I think that I'm starting to understand it."

"How?" Wes asked hopefully.

"I got the pewterer downtown to make some molds and pour me baseball and other players, like little Monopoly markers. Then I've got a big map of Fulda and all its little outliers that are mixed up with Isenburg and Hanau and imperial knights like the von Hutten family and whatever. Not a decent topo map. The places are just little six-sided pieces of paper, like a game board. And I got some paint for the players. So a Lutheran is a baseball player and if he's an independent imperial knight, he's got a blue bat instead of a green one. A Jesuit is a yellow football player; a Franciscan is a red one, and if she's a nun, she's pink. The Benedictines here at the abbey are orange. Stuff like that. And I've got them set down on the spots where they belong. It's all on a table in my office. You should come by and look at it some time. By the time we get around to holding elections, I should know which precinct is what and where the trouble spots will probably be. Andrea's putting her land title markers on it, too."