JeffEngel wrote:
There may be some weak reason to think that Zion didn't shuffle Out Islander priests much around the Out Islands just for not caring enough to: they are few, they are distant, and they may as well be interchangeable for all Zion cared until recently. On the other hand, shuffling is standard over the lowest ranks of the priesthood, and even if they were practicing policies that had the effect of isolating Out Islanders from mainlanders, they could still shuffle the Out Islanders among the islands. We've not textev either way and speculation in either direction is way out on a thin limb.
Certainly if Charisian priests exposed to Charisian theology under the influence of the Brotherhood were shuffled to other Out Islands, it'd affect the religious climate on those other islands more than if the Charisian priests all stayed at home and the channels of influence were all less direct (parishioners, printed sermons, etc.).
I imagine Zion - even bishops executors on the Out Islands - may have been a bit suspicious about Out Islander priests volunteering themselves for transfer among the Out Islands. On the other hand, those bishops executor may have been the people doing Zion's work shuffling the priests among the Islands themselves: even if Zion cannot be brought around to caring enough, a diligent BE could hope to win some points by assiduously following policy that way on his own, in concert with his counterpart on the next (remote, borderline-heretical, Langhorne-forsaken, but pleasantly wealthy) Out Island.
I don't think the reasons were "weak". Even here on Earth, the influence of the two biggest monotheist religions grew weaker the further away one got from those religions' geographic centers. Protestantism was strongest in Germany and northern France because they were separated from Rome by hundred of kilometers of land and very big mountain ranges. The same is true in Islam, where distances had enabled the schism between House Umayia and House Abbas and later on the Sunni and Shiite schisms. In the case of the Safeholdian "out islands", that distance is augmented by thousands of miles of salt water in between them and Zion.
Add to that the purely personal interests of clergymen who want to go places that would enhance, rather than diminish, their career prospects and personal wealth or to places that are closer to "civilization" as they thought it. Add also the fact that according to RFC, the out islands should have been represented by one or two vicars on the Council and weren't because the Church had opted to neglect them entirely in the big political game of the Church. And add to that the fact that the Charisian clergy didn't spread the gospel of Saint Zhernau even if they somehow got sent elsewhere because they were peripherally aware of the dangers of preaching their unorthodox views to anyone on the outside.
Now though we see that the Church of Charis is doing the missionary work that everyone feels they should have done long ago - and the reason they can is because they no longer need to fear some overzealous inquisitor or bishop-executor hauling them in for preaching "heresy" as Staynair found himself before Ahdymsyn in OAR after Tirion's death. And all of those "missionaries" are backed by the bayoneted rifles of the ICA and RSA themselves so they are free to preach reform and the gospel of Saint Zhernau throughout the Charisian Empire and anywhere on the mainland where they can get to.
