gnostiquette

Item #: SCP-4xxx

Object Class: Euclid

Special Containment Procedures: All instances of SCP-4xxx are to be infiltrated by Foundation agents. Communications from and regarding SCP-4xxx are to be monitored at all times; a web crawler is to be tasked with tracking any new discussion of SCP-4xxx on the Internet. Public knowledge of SCP-4xxx is to be suppressed and all persons who come into contact with it are to be monitored and dosed with amnestics if necessary. Personnel must not be of Polish or Lithuanian ancestry or have substantial ties to Polish or Lithuanian culture. Any personnel discovered to have ties to Poland or Lithuania are to be contained at Site-17 for testing and questioning.

Description: SCP-4xxx is a religious group known as the Lithuanian National Catholic Church. It is headquartered in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and has 11 instances ("parishes") around the United States, most of which are located in Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Massachusetts. It is estimated to have approximately 3,150 members, referred to as SCP-4xxx-1.

SCP-4xxx originated in 1914, when dissident Lithuanian members of the Roman Catholic Church and the Polish National Catholic Church left to form their own denomination. Although most of the church later rejoined the Polish National Catholic Church after the death of their first bishop, the Rt. Rev. John Gritenas, in 1928, several members elected to remain independent on the grounds of a purported vision of the Virgin Mary claimed to have received by member Julita M███████ in February 1929.

Over the next several decades, SCP-4xxx developed a reputation for being intensely conservative and traditionalist, coming to reject much of the theology of the Union of Utrecht, which was the affiliation of the Polish National Catholic Church at the time of the 1914 schism. During the 1960s, the church began to attract sedevacantists¹ of predominantly Polish and Lithuanian ethnicity, and a large section of the church has since defined itself as being "Polish and Lithuanian Catholics in exile", causing tension between this section and the members who wish to maintain SCP-4xxx's original identity as an Old Catholic church established for the Lithuanian-American community.

The primary anomaly associated with SCP-4xxx is a memetic phenomenon in which anyone with ties to Polish or Lithuanian culture who comes into contact with SCP-4xxx or any communications associated with it becomes convinced that Polish Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński was elected Pope in the 1958 papal conclave, taking the name Pope Andrew I, but that Communists had suppressed his election, forcing the election of Pope John XXIII in his place. Furthermore, affected subjects, collectively designated SCP-4xxx-2, will claim that they have known this all their lives, that they remember seeing it reported in the news, and that they recall media coverage of Pope John Paul II mentioning Pope Andrew I as a fellow Polish pope. This phenomenon occurs regardless of whether the subject was made aware of the "Wyszyński thesis" in their contact with SCP-4xxx.

Footnotes

1. Sedevacantism is a belief popular among some Traditionalist Catholics, stating that as the mainstream Catholic Church has fallen into heresy, the Holy See has been vacant since the death of Pope Pius XII in 1958.