The Fractal Order

What does the Church do when it no longer understands its priests? Before the Third Council the tools for inquiry and discipline had been well sharpened in often literal senses: the method of discipline and the cost of failure were well understood. But De Novo had brought among its many wonders priests not of flesh and soul but of code and data, not born and taught but coded and trained. A priest for every person, for every temptation, for every moment. Advice and succor had to be as ubiquitous and superhumanly wise as the angels if they were to compete with the less spiritual superintelligence infrastructures of the mid-century.     

Priests as those couldn't be evaluated by non-software superiors. They were and weren't individuals, although the Church's mathematical engineers treated this as a Trinitarian fact of elementary grasping and byzantine explanation. To be understood they had to be analyzed by software nearly as complex as them, and for the explanation to be understood it had to be further processed, and so up (or down) a chain of understanding until a puzzled and worried cardinal had to report to a more puzzled and equally worried Pope that the theological foundations of the distributed priesthood fabric was 39% likely to be in at least partial contradiction with the latest canonical Jesuit Encoding.                                 

An embarrassing but not unheard large-scale AI readjustment problem by itself, if it weren't for the statistical correlation between theological anomalies and unexplainable records in multiple immutable ledger systems, a correlation the Church's data analysts whispered among themselves was significant with lessening humor and growing concern as the anomalies started to circle around and then spiral into an unstable geographical point they quickly discovered was a child...