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Here's the most difficult example of was/were I came across as I wrote my current book. There are a total of six:

With the help of njc and Janet Reid, we got it down to three:

Chapter 28, King of the Salves, is up. It's a cleaned up version of the same chapter from v2, including suggested edits from reviewers. I also rewrote the opening to make it more from Joseph's POV, rather than that of a neutral narrator. Given that the temperature reaches up to 50 degrees Celsius due to the Warming, I got rid of the convertible taxis. The cabs are fusion-powered, so there's plenty of energy to keep the cabs running and the air conditioners going. Leonardo's cab is specially equipped, since he's the Crazed Cabbie, and can eject its roof. The aero-hunters are open-air vehicles to begin with, since the guards need to be able to stand up in them and shoot at those they're pursuing.

Quick, go read!
Dirk

Welcome. Here is a quote from a post my Marilyn Johnson that you may find useful: The one thing I would suggest is when you post your first chapter or story or poem, make sure to post it in a group that pays points to the reviewer, like the Premium group.  If you're not a member of it yet, may I suggest you join that one before you post.  You will get more reviewers if they get points for their review, which they will use to post their next piece.

I finally continued watching the Exorcist Anthology. The film with the worst rating, Exorcist: The Beginning (11% on rottentomatoes.com), was almost as good as the original film, in my opinion. I actually ended up buying the Kindle book for that movie. It's very well written. That leaves me just one more film in the series, Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist, which is an alternate story from that of Exorcist: The Beginning.

The Catholic ritual for exorcisms only uses the line "The power of Christ compels you." one time, whereas the movies repeatedly uses "The power of God commands you. The power of Christ commands you." It's too bad that isn't part of the real ritual, since I was going to use those lines myself.

Thanks for the links, njc. I've only briefly reviewed them, but will do so in detail before I start planning the main story elements. I'm leaning toward keeping climate change out of the book and going with the original, simpler premise of the Antichrist trying to seize control of the Church in the present. It would be far easier to write without having to become well-versed in climate science, not to mention having to project the story world forward 30-40 years. Dan Brown tried to include antimatter physics in his Angels & Demons book and got the fundamentals wrong. Studying Catholicism is hard enough.

My initial impression is that wattsupwiththat.com isn't trying to give a balanced view of climate change, but refute it. Some of the links I followed in your first article showed what appeared to be cherry-picking from the papers. I also saw one reference in passing to Breitbart News, which is not a site I would look to for unbiased opinions. I'll see if I can find it again when I read the articles in depth. I prefer "fair and balanced". :-)

Your last article talks about 413 papers that refute some of the arguments made by climate change supporters, but doesn't say how many papers were published reaffirming the general consensus. It's roughly 13,750 (97%). Below is a link claiming the remaining 3% of papers were flawed.
https://qz.com/1069298/the-3-of-scienti … ll-flawed/

Interesting discovery. Apparently no one can accurately estimate the global assets of the Catholic Church, not even the Church itself. Most of the assets/income outside of the Vatican are held by the individual dioceses and religious orders for their own use. They're all separate corporations, most led by bishops. Only a small amount (Peter's Pence) is transferred to the Vatican, which has revenue in the low hundreds of millions, mostly from investment returns and tourism. Many of the assets have never been appraised, because the Church would never sell them (e.g., cathedrals, Vatican artwork from the Middle Ages, etc.). Most are on the books for $1.

One figure puts total Catholic Church spending in the U.S. at $170B annually, but most of that money comes from health insurers who pay Catholic hospitals for covered medical procedures, so it's not exactly charity. University tuition received from students is another big part of that total. The biggest Catholic charity in the U.S. spends about $4B annually. Another interesting number is Church collections. The average weekly donation in the U.S. is $10, although the source wasn't clear if that was per Catholic or per family. That totals at most $36B. That's not even enough for disaster recovery from one major hurricane.

In Germany, church members are actually taxed by the federal government on behalf of the churches, which then get the money. Try that in the U.S. :-)

It's going to be tricky imagining a Catholic Church rich enough to lead much of the world's response to accelerating climate change. I need a Church that grows exponentially 3-4 decades from now as people afraid of the end times return to God, and to the Catholic Church in particular. I was hoping for up to 2B Catholics by the start of the book, which is about 50% more than the current figure. On the up side, 30-40 years is more than enough time to build big companies like Apple, Facebook, or Google. If the Church could build or inherit that kind of wealth, it could make quite a dent and attract more followers.

I could do the story with current numbers, although the Book of Revelation prophecies a worldwide religion, so it would be better if the Church was much larger to justify it becoming the Antichrist's main target.

I've simply been responding to the suggestions people are making. I don't plan to write in Italian. I couldn't. Based on this discussion, I will either pretend everyone is speaking Italian (rendered into English), and I'll state that in the description a few times where needed, or I'll pretend almost everyone generally speaks English and throw in a few words or phrases in Italian now and then in their dialogue. The latter is what Dan Brown did, and it worked very well.

Thanks to everyone for their ideas.
Dirk

Don't you need to be fluent in the language to do that? At best, I might be able to hire someone to translate a few dozen words or phrases sprinkled throughout.

Mariana, *all* of the dialogue in the book is among native Italians. I can't write an English book with purely Italian dialogue. Who would understand it?

Thanks, Bill/Janet/njc. Throwing in occasional words or phrases of actual Italian is appealing, although I'll probably end up with errors. Even Dan Brown got some of his Italian wrong in the original release of Angels & Demons. Fortunately, only real Italian speakers will know. More intimidating is getting inside the head of the most senior cardinal (the Secretary of State) and into meetings of the Council of Cardinal Advisers. How do the most senior Catholics on the planet think and conduct themselves?