Foreign institution · also Church & religious
Holy Seat
Also called the wider Church · the Pontifex · the Seat · the Holy Seat's mission
The far centre of the aligned churches, whose blessing is thought necessary for the full gravity of office to rest on the greater clergy. It is a port before it is a shrine, with harbour law, outer batteries, quarantine chapels and harbour courts, and every aligned church keeps an emissary and officium inside the Sepulchrum complex.
The supreme Church authority, holding an island with its own harbour and garrison, a walled city never taken, and estates scattered across a dozen states under different protectors. It keeps emissaries, households and archives abroad, and its harbour law is copied widely. The seat of the Pontifex Maximus, the highest visible head of the wider Church. Most Britons know it only through seals, censures, portraits, feast formulae, diplomatic missions and relic judgements; it sends mission clergy through London.
Named with it
- Pontifex Maximus Leo XIV
- Cardinal-Archivist Tommaso della Scala
- Canon-Envoy Lucius Verdan
- cardinals, archivists and appointed emissaries
Ties
- the British Church insists on its liberties toward it
- governed by the Conclavium Cardinalium and the Conclavium Emissariorum
- archive: Archivum Magnum Sacrae Sedis
- knights: the Sepulchral Guard
- the Church of Britannia is aligned with it but answers slowly
- over the Brothers of Mercy
- holds the Archivum Magnum Sacrae Sedis
- would have to choose between the British and Pruss churches if their quarrel were forced
In the chronicle
At the table
Treated in Britannia with formal reverence and practical caution; disputes arise when a local authority discovers distance has not made the Holy Seat irrelevant. Relics enter Britannia under its seal; it holds that a relic cannot be owned, only kept. Its agents watch shrines, relic traffic and doctrinal breaches wherever British ships anchor. Britannia keeps a legation there and resents the arrangement while depending on it. Its mission houses often become the unofficial school in which newer embassies learn how the capital works; recognised by Verdan's packet traffic and its chapel lamps.