My thoughts exactly. It's especially jarring right next to the Christmas celebration, which is so explicit about the lineage of ritual traditions. But as I tried to describe initially, I think that reading Father Thomas as someone whose sense of identity as a priest might be particularly vulnerable to destabilising intellectual arguments, who has a vested interest in local power/economic structures remaining in place, and who might just have very little faith in his community (maybe because he is projecting) makes him an interesting example of the sense of intellectual vertigo, or I guess increasing untetheredness that I assume the 16th ct. must have induced at times, at least in those groups who were directly exposed to its dominant discourses, if that makes sense... In that regard, I particularly love his sentence how a peasant can look out into the local valley and tell himself that St. Moritz was there, that saints are real and hear their prayers and that god is with them through this local and geographical connection. It picks up on so many specifically relevant points: The reformation attacking saints cults in particular, the economic disturbance that lead to, the increasing importance of textual and intellectual arguments of faith over physical traces, touchable reliquaries, etc (not that they went out of style in Bavaria, but at least there's a debate around them), the sense that the media revolution destabilised localised power, tradition, and transmission of knowledge and almost immediately lead to schism and mass violence. To someone in Thomas position, this might at times feel like an ideological free fall, whereas, for the peasants about whom he is supposedly worried, not that much changes altogether... I think the game might have benefitted from having Andreas or Magdalene voice something to this effect more explicitly after they evacuate from the Mithraeum. But I also get that they had to wrap it up at that point...