“A vast loneliness awaits us among the stars. It is not the great expanse or the distances between systems. It is not the deep of unmapped space. There is no place untouched by the light of God, and where there is light, there can never be emptiness. No, the loneliness I speak of is the distance between us and God. The rituals that bind us—the feasts and holy days—all these and more must be engraved onto our hearts and remain on our lips. Anyone calling themselves Christian, whether members of the Mother Church, Orthodoxy, or even one of the misguided branches of Protestantism, all must join their voice and soul to these practices. A chain of ritual and prayer, stretching through time and space, will be what binds all the descendants of Adam to the Holy One. Separation by physical distance is meaningless to God, and for whom a thousand years is but a day. If a sparrow shall not fall without His notice, then how much more will God notice the believer praying, even in the darkest of nights on the farthest side of the furthest moon?

This is how humanity will combat soul-crushing loneliness. The powers and princes that populate what we perceive as an empty vacuum are hidden from our sight. We cannot turn to them for succor or balm for our souls yearning to be part of a host. Without our unyielding faith in the Lamb Exalted expressed through our acts of prayer and devotion, humanity would succumb to the unimaginable isolation of deep space travel. Instead, our acts tie us to that great host, both seen and unseen, full of angels and saints and us—a host connected through all time and eternity to the very throne of Heaven. It is only through the eternal communion of the saints that humanity can gaze into the eternal night and remain human.” — Cardinal Hugo Durand, excerpt from “On the Divine Right to Reason” published fifty years before Legion’s invasion