A Printer's Choice

by W. L. Patenaude

  “Just an observation,” McClellan said, looking past Zhèng into the inner room, from which came the faint sounds of trickling water. “Now that we’re alone, I assume we can talk freely. I have questions, lots of them. But first, what is all this—especially given Jansen’s continued reminders against public displays of faith? The flag outside I figure the builders put up. But this? There was no mention in any of the mission briefings of this sort of architecture or papal heraldry, much less a stained-glass icon of Christ. The builders can’t be responsible. This was all printed.”

  Zhèng was on the other side of the inner doors. He turned with a concerned look. “The engineers do like to keep secrets when communicating with the lower world. Although you have my permission to share news of all this when you speak with your archbishop in a few hours.”

  “I will,” McClellan said. “But after everything we’ve been told about the New World Agreement, I’m not sure he’ll believe me.”

  “Perhaps. Although you have a reputation for being persuasive. In any event, we should hurry. Our departure window for Red Delta is fixed and the orbits wait for no one. Please, let me show you what is ahead. There are matters that we must discuss privately. Then we’ll have the formal briefing.”

  “Understood. But shouldn’t Clarke and Okayo be with us?”

  “Later. But as I said, there are matters we should discuss first, in private.”

  For the first time since they met, Zhèng looked frightened. “Father McClellan, what I have to say is difficult to explain. Let’s continue into your chapel. What you see in this room pales compared to what awaits beyond.”

  The Foundation of the Armies of the

  Soldados de Salvación:

  An Introduction

  BY PETER CARDINAL MWENDA KWALIA

  HOLY SEE SECRETARIAT OF STATE,

  VATICAN CITY, ROME

  Introductory note: This summary is based on my larger work, Juan Carlos Solorzano and the History of the Soldados de Salvación. It is an introduction for courses at various national seminaries based in Rome. What follows contains information from sources that are confirmed by me personally. When necessary, I maintain the anonymity of the sources for their protection. + Peter Cardinal Mwenda Kwalia

  TO BETTER UNDERSTAND JUAN Carlos Solorzano and the armies he spawned, you must not only understand something of the world that he was born into—a world he rejected—but also what came before that. You must understand that the people who are the heart of Mexico have long sought justice—that in ages past, they spilled their blood fighting the Spanish for freedom. Then, a century later, they fought the harsh owners of the farms and sugarcane fields that stretched across the hills of Morelos. You must appreciate that many descendants of the Spanish found some small prosperity among the troubles of their nation, mostly laboring in the fields, growing sugar for the world, while the native peoples farmed simply to survive.

  The first of the great world wars passed over these people. The second brought division as towns and families debated which power to back—whether it was the Russians, the Germans, or the Allies that had the greater cause for defending what was right and just. Mexico soon chose, and sons and brothers soon fought bravely, especially in the Pacific, alongside the forces of the United States.

  The workers in the fields of Morelos worried about their sons and brothers, and they hoped that when this war ended, life would return to what it had been. But in the years after that war, the people of Morelos—who knew change well—could tell that a new revolution was coming.

  There was despair when machines took many of the jobs of the fields. But in time the workers found opportunities in the new factories, built by foreigners to assemble the automobile components for a world desiring speed and status. Then more factories rose. Greater factories. Throughout Mexico, men and women and robots built hundreds of thousands of polished automobiles, designed ever anew by the companies’ engineers for a world with an insatiable appetite for more.

  In 2041, when the land began to complain of drought and the crops would not produce without pollination, the factory workers did not taste the drier air, or see that the sugarcane grew sluggishly and then not at all. The farmers worked harder and they worried, but were silent. Even so, they knew what was coming—especially the indigenous people, who had known the natural ways and the normal cycles of the land for centuries, long before the Spanish came.

  And what was happening now had never happened before.

  As the yields of the farms continued to fall, the people employed by the factories could still earn a living. And so they worked, and worked hard, alongside the endless motion of robot welders.

  Then came a winter day in 2045 when, just before noon, the bosses sent the workers home—and then kept them home for a week, and then for three weeks. Then the factories were idled until further notice. The bosses hired back a few of the men to mothball the robots, and then the men were sent home. They stood in the streets with their neighbors and they read the newsfeeds as they came. They read about fewer buyers of their automobiles, how the farmlands the world over were turned to desert or were flooded by the storms. Storms whose torrents stripped the topsoil till the streams and the rivers ran black to the sea.

  The Catholic Church had brought some order, in Morelos and throughout Mexico, with food and money donated by parishes that could still afford charity. The Jesuits and Franciscans provided medical care, the Dominicans kept schools open, and the bishops offered shelter for the living and burial for the dead. The drug cartels sometimes supported these efforts with the quiet transfer of monies—and yet they, too, saw what was coming and worried.

  Weapons remained in demand. This kept cash flowing and business relationships firm around the globe. But the wars of the age were mostly in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. The Mexican cartels’ reach was limited by that of the Islamic African Nations, which controlled great stretches of equatorial Africa, far reaches of the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, and its airspace. The Islamic armies fiercely protected their own markets and their own supplies of food and clean water—and they expanded their influence.

  The years came and became memories. The summer sun baked the Americas, along with the rest of the globe, and left much of the land either arid, scorched, or flooded. The winters came with an unstable jet stream, and the ground froze as far south as the Rio Grande. In the worst winters—those with the great blizzards that blanketed the solar farms—criminal enterprises soon controlled the archaic fossil fuel supplies in the Americas, as the Islamic armies did throughout Africa and Europe. Millions died in those months, most especially in Asia and in the Americas, as the legal or criminal reach of authorities in those regions waned with the cold and the heat, with the famine and riots. In big cities, the urgent pleas of the mayors went unheeded, and they were left to fend for themselves. With the Islamic African Nations’ nuclear attacks on Atlanta, Georgia, and St. Augustine, Florida, the armies of North America had more pressing issues—as did their counterparts across the globe.

  In the winter of 2054, Pope John XXV made his historic visit to Zurich to meet with the Assembly of the newly instituted Global Union. He pleaded for aid to defend Christians throughout Europe and Africa. The members of the Assembly—those few who had come to listen, anyway—rejected these pleas. Their constitution, they said, forbade the Global Union from taking a stance in any war between the religions.

  Five weeks later the pontiff released “with great distress” his encyclical Tutari Debeant—A Duty to Protect—declaring the moral rights of Christians to defend themselves and to wage just wars if civil authorities did not. The document placed firm boundaries on what was meant by such defense, rooting these limits in the Church’s ancient teachings that had been adopted, oddly enough, within the GU constitution by authors who never stopped to think about where the ideas had originated.

  “May no loyal son or daughter of the Church misunderstand the truth that such defense cannot include inflicting harm for personal
gain or against innocent lives,” St. John XXV wrote. “To do so is contrary to the Gospel of Life, given to us by Jesus Christ. We pray that Almighty God, the Author of Life and the Prince of Peace, will protect all peoples from the dark choice between cherishing life and defending the innocent.”

  In Morelos, a young Juan Carlos Solorzano read his pope’s words and rejected them. “With all respect,” he later wrote to the pontiff, “for those who wish to survive, who wish his people to survive, there can be no limits to war and power.”

  That text is from Solorzano’s first, brief letter to Pope John XXV. Solorzano wrote little in his early years, and even less in his later ones. And while all his letters are of scholarly value, this one is greatly studied. It was written on the Feast of the Annunciation 2054—the day when the nineteen-year-old claims to have had his first vision, which he later maintained was of Michael the Archangel.

  Here we turn to extant sources to better understand the man who claimed these disputed visitations. One such source comes from an anonymous text, of which I will share this fragment:

  Solorzano was lean and tall like his two older brothers but had his grandfather’s muscular frame. He had the straight black hair of the Solorzano men, and his mother’s gray-blue eyes. He had her intellect, too. She was a physicist at a university in Cuernavaca, and she had taught him much. With a passion for bringing order to the world and wealth to his nation, Juan Carlos Solorzano said he found inspiration in the laws of the cosmos—in how they would not waver, no matter the desires or weaknesses of men.

  His parents had begged him to leave the cartels. He responded that this was not possible, not in a world that offered only crime or starvation. Even if there had been another way, he said, he would still have chosen the black markets. The drug lords brought order in ways that the government, the Church, and the factories could not.

  His two brothers also worried over him. In better days, before the famine and the wars demanded other priorities, they were celebrated minor league baseball players. Sure that someday the leagues would play again, they begged their brother to focus on his athletics, to be an honest man like them.

  The youngest Solorzano listened with respect but went his own way.

  And he grew in standing among the drug lords.

  When Morelos and the nation needed strength, Juan Carlos Solorzano prided himself on wielding “real power” at only eighteen, while his family was powerless, for there was nothing that professors, factory administrators like his father, or baseball players could do in a world that had embraced survival and cruelty.

  Little is known about what happened that morning of the Feast of the Annunciation on the road to Palo Grande. The driver later told the story to several reporters, with Solorzano’s permission and urging, and later to the Bishop of the Diocese of Cuernavaca and the papal nuncio of Mexico.

  “It was peaceful,” the driver began the story each time. “We drove as the sun rose, as we had hundreds of times. Solorzano talked about the words written by the pope—words on war. We turned a bend, and he screamed for me to stop the truck. So I did, and I went for my gun. He slammed the truck door to open it and went away through the scrub and up a small path to a rise that had only one tree upon it. The tree was lit like gold. I went to follow, but he said to wait, to order the others not to follow—by then the trucks behind and before us had stopped and we all stood and wondered what was happening.

  “Solorzano ascended the hill and he went to his knees, and began to cry and shout, as if a man both in great pain and great joy. He shouted that he was the servant of the angels.

  “None of us on the road knew what to do, so we signed ourselves with the cross and said the Our Father, which made us feel safe. When Solorzano returned to the truck he was not the man that I had known since we were children—not the leader of a small band of men here in Mexico. He was a leader of a great army, a world leader, a man who had been spoken to by God’s very angel and had been given the task of defending Mexico and all the Americas from the Muslim armies, and from all the evils of all the governments who do not believe in God. From that morning we followed him, for to be Solorzano’s soldier is to do the will of the savior of the world.”

  As for Solorzano’s sanity, that had been in question since before his vision on the road to Palo Grande. Just four months earlier, two days after his nineteenth birthday, he had ordered his parents’ execution, along with a dozen others on their parish’s social justice team who had dared to criticize the generosity of the cartels that fed the locals. It has been confirmed that Solorzano had sent emissaries to the funerals. They brought word of his sympathies to Solorzano’s brothers, as well as warnings that it would be best if they fled after their parents’ burial.

  The message of the angel was dismissed by the Church, and it became a cause of conflict for many within the cartels. In the words of Bishop Alejandro Soto of blessed memory, “Solorzano’s vision is at best the ravings of a madman, and at worse the seduction of Satan, the fallen angel who knows us well enough to appear to us in the forms of our desires.”

  Bishop Soto had a history of resisting the drug lords. He quickly ordered that no Catholic should associate the words of Solorzano with divine intervention. Yet some did. And then more. And soon there were tens of thousands.

  Solorzano’s early followers came from the many in Morelos and throughout Mexico who had once worked in fields or labored in the factories and were starving, frightened, and weary of burying the people that they loved. Solorzano’s vision—whether true or not—brought hope. It attracted many to the young man’s growing army—his newly formed Soldados de Salvación.

  Solorzano was strategic, and soon his power spread across the Americas, then into Europe and across Africa. He had a plan—one that could not only wipe out the armies of both the Global Union and the Islamic African Nations, but also fulfill the greater urgings of the angel he encountered on the hill in Morelos.

  Again I will share a segment of a text from an anonymous author:

  In her days at university, Solorzano’s mother had assisted with research that would be used by three-dimensional printers. There were rules about what she could divulge, but it is believed that she told her son what she could, and hoped that what she shared would intrigue the brilliant boy and lead him down a path that would do good.

  There is conjecture that after their execution, when Solorzano came to take his parents’ belongings, he hacked into his mother’s computers to learn who else was researching the printers, and where. He likely redoubled these efforts after his vision, for, as he later wrote, his mission to save the world would require this new technology.

  And yet the Global Union took little notice of Solorzano. In time, they monitored his rise as they did any warlord who might offer some benefit. In the beginning, the Soldados da Salvación had helped keep the armies of the Islamic African Nations in check at no cost to the Global Union’s own armies. Solorzano’s forces also provided the GU with good reason to maintain Christianity on the list of watched ideologies.

  To that end, Solorzano was more helpful than the GU had anticipated.

  On Easter Sunday 2069, Solorzano hacked into the GU communications networks to share his news with all the world: he said that Michael had come a second time. He said that the angel had told the great leader of the Soldados de Salvación what needed to happen, and who needed to die, to prepare the world for the imminent Second Coming of Jesus Christ.

  Pope Francis III issued a harsh and public rebuke of Solorzano, as well as a plea for him to lay down his arms.

  In response, on the following Saturday, the forces of the Soldados de Salvación rose from sleeper cells across northern Africa and the Middle East, and as far north as Turkey and Eastern Europe. The Sals, as they had come to be known, killed tens of thousands of the Islamic African Nations’ soldiers—the force that for decades had blunted the reach of the Mexican cartels, and then had dared attack the Americas. In Europe, the Sals slaughtered five battalions
of the GU’s Elite Guard. This was the force that had been protecting fifty thousand refugees—mostly children—along the Bulgarian border of Turkey. It took Solorzano’s forces only an hour to incinerate them all.

  Solorzano gave praise to his army, and to the angel who had spoken to him. And he promised more slaughter.

  Finally, the Global Union paid Solorzano heed—especially the GU’s engineers, who found a definite pattern in Solorzano’s attacks. It could be nothing but intentional, after all, that the Soldados de Salvación focused so precisely in areas of Eastern Europe that held key research centers for the development of high-definition printers.

  Pope Francis III was briefed on Solorzano’s interest in the new printing technologies, but had more pressing concerns.

  Twenty hours after the attacks, he stood limply on the central balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica. It was a rainswept Feast of Divine Mercy—a day of drenched pilgrims who came against the cautions of the Roman police and GU security. But the crowds assembled nonetheless, looking for hope among the sorrows of their time. After praying for the dead, Francis III issued his bull of excommunication for all those serving or in any way supporting the Soldados de Salvación—and anyone who supported Juan Carlos Solorzano, who, on the great feast of mercy, was himself specifically named as excommunicated from the Church.

  This was done, the Filipino pontiff said, against the advice of the Mexican bishops, who worried over retribution. It was his decision alone to speak so openly. The excommunication of Solorzano and his army had to be acknowledged, he said, partly as a recognition of the truth before him—that Solorzano’s blatant and public disregard for the teachings and the authority of the Church had separated him from the Body of Christ. It was also an act of mercy intended for all those tempted to join an army that could only have been spawned in hell.

  “Come home, I urge you!” the pontiff cried in fluent Spanish while the world watched, and the rain drenched his white cassock in spite of the master of ceremonies’ efforts with an umbrella. “You are welcome home, in full communion with the Body of Christ—home with your Mother, the Church. But you must renounce your hostilities and come to the grace of the Sacrament of Reconciliation, which I will hear myself! Please, my son, for the good of all the world and the salvation of your eternal soul, I beg you, come home, and be an instrument of God’s peace!”