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world the Church is indeed a fraud. If God sacrificed His only begotten Son to redeem us from our sins, then why have we not been saved? If it was a just and omnipotent God who entrusted the Earth to our stewardship, then why did He not intervene before we slew it?
    To invoke the satanic answer is to provoke the sardonic secular response—“We have met the Devil, and he is Us.”
    True, all too true, from a certain perspective. It was Man who failed his stewardship and crucified the biosphere upon an inverted cross of fossilized sulfur and brimstone. And it is Man, unable to escape the species consequences of what he has done, who seeks to escape from Judgment by hiding in the soulless software of a “transcorporeal successor.”
    Who can deny that this is satanic behavior? Yet to deem ourselves the perfect satanic masters of the dark forces that move through us is more satanic still. For it denies what the Church still promises—redemption and salvation, if not for our planet, or yet our durance upon it, then for the light within even the most benighted of spirits at the end of life and time.
    If we cannot believe in such salvation, then what are we? If I do not believe that the Authorof such salvation is at work behind the imperfections of His Church, then I am no true priest. If I leave the discipline of the Church to follow my own imperfect conscience, then do I not in the end deprive the Church of my contribution as I deny myself its grace?
    These are the thoughts that fill the mind of a dying old priest with nothing to do but feebly pace a withering meadow under the Greenhouse sun attempting to reconcile himself to the terminal future, or sit beneath the ghostly cathedral of a skeletal dome brooding upon the theological conflicts of the past.
    I was born into the even-then-dwindling community of believers, to a family of dairy farmers still trying to survive in the Massif Central of France, and when my parents were finally forced to move down into Claremont-Ferrand to seek work, I found myself in a dismal urban landscape from which the seminary seemed a blissful escape. As a young priest, I was sent to the Amazon Blight, where I witnessed firsthand the futility of luring the fallen to the churchyard with bags of grain so as to preach salvation to their deaf ears.
    The reports I sent back were the first of my writings to be sealed by the Church, but they brought me to the attention of a like-minded Cardinal, who advanced my career into the Church’s intellectual hierarchy, which I occasionally represented before the media.
    This was shortly before Roberto I issued his bull granting continuity of spirit to single successor clones, and I was one of those whose arguments were to lose out to the infallibility of the Pope.
    “Where will it end?” I demanded before cameras and microphones. “If a single copy of personality software contains the immortal soul of its fleshly template, then how can it be said to be absent from a second copy, or the third, or the thousandth? In truth, they must all be mere expert system simulations. For the soul, being indivisible, cannot be duplicated and, being immortal, cannot be captured in an impermanent physical matrix.”
    “Could you give us the sound bite version, Father?”
    “The soul cannot be transplanted from one body to the next like another cloned organ. Your successor clone is mere meatware programmed to model your consciousness. Your consciousness no longer exists, and your soul is already before the Throne of Judgment.”
    “In words of one syllable, Father De Leone?”
    “You’re dead, the clone is a satanic golem, your soul is in the hands of God, and there’s nothing whatever that science will ever be able to do about it.”
    Well, when Roberto I issued his bull to the contrary soon thereafter, my days as a public spokesman for the Church were at an end, and my career asan opposition theologian had, like it or not, already begun.
    I must admit that at first I