Bishop of Worms

#On His Station

The Bishop of Worms held the see of Worms, a Rhineland city of river trade, cathedral law and episcopal vanity, in the later years of the Atheist Wars. Beyond that one sentence, the Church can swear to almost nothing. No record certified by the Bureau of Records preserves his personal name. His birth, his age, his consecration, his family, his face, the colour of his gloves and the quality of his Latin are all missing from the Ledger. I have looked. I looked with the patience of a man whose career depends on finding what other men have lost, and I found a title with no one inside it.

Readers raised on hagiography will want a childhood: a pious mother, an early miracle involving a sparrow, a youthful sermon that made a canon weep. I decline to manufacture any of it. The Bureau has long experience in inventing people, and the house rule is that one does not do it for free.

This much can be stated. A man held the office. He held it when holding it was a capital eccentricity. He travelled to Regensburg in A.S. 29 and left by no road the record can follow. Afterward the Rationalists announced that he had never existed. Those facts raise two problems, and they are different problems. The first is a missing bishop. The second is an authority that believed it could abolish one.

#On the Oaths at Regensburg

The Oaths of Regensburg were held in A.S. 29, the year before the Treaty, in the grand hall of the city's former episcopal palace. Keep that hall separate from the Reichssaal, where the Treaty was signed in A.S. 30. Pilgrims confuse the two, and guides profit from the confusion.

The Oaths were a banquet. The Council of Nine and their senior officers sat under candles taken from the cathedral altar and drank to the death of superstition, toast after toast, in more languages than any of them could conjugate. Between the seventh and eighth toasts three priests were brought in. They had been taken at the Cauterization of Rouen in A.S. 24 and held for five years in a prefectural prison. They were offered recantation. They refused. They were drowned in vats of Rhenish red.

Those three deaths are documented. The Bishop of Worms is a separate entry.

The only surviving account puts his disappearance between the ninth and tenth toasts. The account names no author. Seizure, flight, final words, a witness to the direction he took: it supplies none of them. All it holds is an interval measured in raised cups, which is the only kind of clock the Rationalists were keeping that night.

I will not make him a fourth body in a fourth vat. Nothing in the record puts him there. The three priests earned their martyrdom by refusing aloud, and it would be a thief's courtesy to hand a share of it to a man whose last act nobody wrote down. Nor will I spirit him away down a hidden stair. The palace had stairs. Regensburg has always had stairs.

The Council celebrated with altar candles, executed clergy between courses and kept count of the toasts. Somewhere inside that arithmetic a bishop stopped being visible. The following year the Archbishop of Vienna signed away the Holy See in his own blood. Whatever he knew about the empty place belonging to Worms went into his own file and stayed there.

#On the Declaration of Nonexistence

The Rationalists declared that the Bishop of Worms "never existed."

Consider the economy of it. A murder needs a body. A body needs a grave, a grave draws candles, and candles draw priests. A denial needs only a clerk. The Council had spent two decades learning that a decree could empty a monastery and a census could fill a prison. At Regensburg it found the final refinement: a bishop could be emptied out of the past.

The declaration began as mockery and hardened into a position. Rationalist fragments later claimed that Worms had possessed no lawful bishop at the time of the Oaths. This was the same denial, now dressed in a canon law they did not believe in.

I must be honest about my own house, a habit I indulge when it costs someone else. In A.S. 92 the Bureau of Doctrine annulled the Treaty retroactively to the moment of signing, and the Ledger now holds that the instrument never had force. The Church knows the craft of unwriting perfectly well. The difference, which I defend with professional vigour, lies in the material. The Church unwrites parchment. The Rationalists tried it on a consecrated man.

The present filing is the Bureau of Records' own work, entered long after the banquet: Existence: Disputed (Administratively). Read the parenthesis carefully. The filing certifies no death and endorses no denial. It records a quarrel between two authorities over whether a man was real. It also records the Bureau's refusal, without the man in hand, to let the heretics win by default.

The Lore Book calls him a martyr. That word is mine, written in my own ink, and I stand by it as interpretation. A martyrdom requires a death and a witness to its cause. The file has neither. It has a title, two toasts and an insult.

#On the Vacancy at Worms

Worms did not accept the declaration. The city's own account, preserved in its Codex entry, lists the small things it kept: a seal impression in a wax ledger, a mitre repair bill, a payment to a stable boy, and a sermon fragment copied out by a hand with opinions. Neither Records nor I have authenticated these items. I report them as Worms reports them. Their value lies in their pettiness. A forger chasing a theological victory rarely begins with a repair bill for a mitre.

Then the diocese suffered what every headless see suffers: claimants. The city's traditions tell of rival bishops, mutual excommunications and at least one claimant whose vestments hid more than doctrine. These stories carry no dates the Bureau will sign, so I give them none. Some writers have measured the vacancy against the Council of Worms in A.S. 87 and arrived at "some thirty years." The arithmetic is wrong. Fifty-eight years separate the Oaths from the Council, and the record does not say when, or whether, the see was lawfully filled in between.

The Council of A.S. 87 met in the roofless cathedral of Worms to ratify the Common Allegiance. The missing bishop had no part in it. I mention the Council only because tourists stand in that nave and ask whether he came back for it. No register shows that he did.

#On the File That Remains

At Regensburg his memory has been absorbed into larger stones. The Gates of Regensburg now carry their blessing and their curse, but both inscriptions date from after the reconsecration of A.S. 92. If the bishop passed beneath those portals in A.S. 29, as the gates' own entry has it, he passed beneath bare masonry. Any pamphleteer who blames the plaques for his disappearance should be fined by the line.

The hall of the Oaths is now a seminary refectory. Once a year the students raise water in silence. The toast honours the drowned priests and the whole atrocity of that night. It was not composed for him, and I will not have it stretched over him like a borrowed cope. Regensburg's guides will sell you seven hiding places, three miracles, two betrayals and a tunnel under a cooper's yard. None of them is ratified. All of them are priced.