Fics like And God said: shall these bones live?

The Catholic Church was dying. It had started even before First Contact, but since then it had only accelerated. The discovery of alien life had raised questions the Church couldn’t answer. Hopeful Dominicans and Jesuits headed out into the black, hoping to find people who had been yearning for millennia for the good news they had to share. But no one had. They all had their own beliefs, millions of known religions by now, each different and just as real to its adherents as Catholics’ were to them. In the face of all that vastness and diversity, it was hard to believe the universe was created by someone who cared what day you ate fish on. So Leonard skipped his prayers, drank more than was good for him, occasionally sought out an anonymous hookup with someone far from his parish boundaries, and every week preached a lackluster homily he didn’t believe to a congregation that seemed smaller than the week before.

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