Veran Catholicism

Veran Catholicism (Stadtverisch: Verischer Katholizismus) is the most prominent denomination of Christianity within the Nauticus Sector of the Gamma Quadrant in the Milky Way, and simultaneously the state religion of the Menschlicher Sternenstaat with the Heiliger Staatskirche as its organizational embodiment. With over four hundred billion adherents of both human and xenoi origin, it holds significant influence in the politics of the Sternenstaat and its client states, in addition to that of nearby nations hosting sizable Veran Catholic population. However, the immense extra-national power and authority of the Holy State Church and its intimate connections to the political machinery of the Sternenstaat has garnered it infamy in the wider astropolitical scene, with many other Christian denominations seeing it as nothing more than an extension of the Staat's almighty power through a more religious lens.

Originating as the colonial extension of the earthbound Roman Catholic Church to the world of Vera in its initial stages of settlement, the large disconnects and sentiments that grew against the bureaucracy of Earth and the growing sedevacantist thoughts against the residing Pope - fomented in part by the ruling colonial corporation, Hahne Astrokörp - lead to an eventual organizational schism between the Veran Catholic churches and that of the Roman Catholic Church on Earth. At this time, there was a significant non-Catholic Protestant population on Vera and other worlds around it, but this demographic soon shifted in favor of the new consecrated church as the Veran Star Confederation formed.

Considered to be "antiquated" by many outsiders and other Christians due to exercising traditional modes of theological rationale long forgotten on Earth, it is one of the few denominations of Christianity - and, in part, Catholicism itself - in the galaxy that disassociates from the "new Catholic age" that had started during the Age of Technology on Earth. Even so, Veran Catholicism has adapted fairly well to absorbing even xenoi converts - many of whom convert due to the defeat or subjugation of their race by the Staat, or the attraction of such an alien religion to their own psyches.