From Our Articles of Incorporation

IHS Bethlehem Church is a Religious Nonprofit Corporation organized under the laws of the State of California. It was founded in the Catholic tradition of faith, worship, and service, and its Articles of Incorporation state its purpose in plain words: to serve God and humanity through prayer, the sacraments, priestly ministry, and works of mercy; to promote the unity of faith and reason; to conduct worship, pastoral care, education, charity, and healing; to encourage art and media as expressions of faith; and to operate worldwide through churches and missions in order to advance faith, peace, and service.

Those sentences were written before any of our work existed. They are not a description of what we have done; they are the measure against which everything we do is to be judged. Each section of this page returns to them. If a thing we do cannot be traced back to one of those purposes, it does not belong to the corporation, and we do not do it under this name.

One Calling

From the outside, our activity may look like several unrelated things: KIBOJO and our other works of art and media, sacred music and church art, a small record of the night sky, and the ordinary religious work of a church. We understand them as a single calling.

The works are the voice. KIBOJO and the works of Star of Mary carry faith, peace, and hope into the world in a form that can be read anywhere. The church is the heart. It prays, it serves, and it holds the works to the purpose for which they were made. None of it is a business: no money arises from it, and we accept no compensation of any kind.

Prayer and Worship

Prayer comes first in our Articles, and it comes first in our days. Before a page of KIBOJO is drawn, before a work is published, before a decision is made about the corporation, there is prayer. We do not say this to sound devout. We say it because a religious corporation that forgets to pray becomes, very quickly, a corporation with a religious name.

Our worship follows the Western liturgical year. On this site you will find the date of Easter, the days until Christmas, and the current season of the Church calendar displayed beside the phase of the Moon. That is not decoration. The date of Easter is fixed by the Moon; the feast of Christmas is fixed by the Sun; the whole rhythm of Christian worship is tied to the motions of the sky. To observe the sky is to keep the calendar of the Church, and to keep the calendar of the Church is to pay attention to the sky.

Pastoral Care and Works of Mercy

A church that only looks upward has forgotten half of its calling. Our Articles name pastoral care, charity, healing, and works of mercy among our purposes, and we take them as obligations rather than aspirations. In this start-up stage, our means are small, and we do not pretend otherwise. What we can do now is modest: we listen, we pray for those who ask, we give what we are able to give, and we build the corporation so that it will one day be able to do more.

We hold to one principle in this area above all others: mercy is not a product and is never sold. Nothing we offer in pastoral care carries a price, a membership tier, or a condition of belief. No money arises from our work in any form. We accept no payment, fee, reward, or compensation of any kind, and the corporation does not hold, and will never hold, a corporate bank account.

Education, and the Unity of Faith and Reason

Our Articles call us to promote the unity of faith and reason. We take that to mean two things at once. First, that faith has nothing to fear from honest observation: a star measured carefully is not a threat to Scripture but a page of it. Second, that reason has nothing to gain from pretending the sacred does not exist: a sky that is only data is a sky that has been half-read.

Our educational work grows directly from this. On this site we publish plain explanations of why a church keeps an observatory; of the passages of Scripture that look up to the heavens; of how the Church calendar is tied to the sky; and of the long, mixed history of faith and science from Copernicus to Father Lemaître, told with both its light and its shadows. We do not hide the shadows. A church that only tells the flattering half of its history is not teaching; it is advertising.

Everything we publish for education is free to read. We do not operate a school, and we do not confer degrees or certificates. We write for the person who looks up at night and wonders whether believing and understanding are enemies. We hold that they are not.

Why a Church Keeps an Observatory

The Psalmist writes that the heavens show forth the glory of God, and the firmament declares the work of his hands. We have taken that sentence as an instruction. If the heavens declare, then someone should be listening, and someone should write it down.

Our observatory is small, it is honest, and it is a side activity rather than the centre of our work. We observe variable stars and other objects with a remote telescope, record what we see, and share those records freely. The records are kept according to a written policy that separates fact from impression: the measurement is recorded in one place, in the plainest language we can manage, and anything we felt about it is recorded somewhere else, clearly marked as ours. A church, of all institutions, should know the difference between what was seen and what was hoped.

We publish the records and images openly. The data are released under an open license so that anyone may use them, and the software that serves them is released under an open license as well. We do this because the sky does not belong to us. We are only the ones who happened to be looking.

We do not claim discoveries we have not made, and we do not dress up routine observation as research breakthroughs. Most of what an observatory does is patient and repetitive. We think patience and repetition are religious virtues, and we are content to practise them.

Sacred Music and Church Art

The corporation makes sacred music and church art as expressions of faith. Our music is rooted in Gregorian chant; a chant choir is being formed, and its recordings will be released through recorded media and publications. Church art—icons, devotional images, and liturgical objects—is made in the same spirit and published in books and other media. Nothing is sold, and no money arises from this work.

The Sanctuary and the Keeping of Sacred Objects

The corporation keeps a physical sanctuary in Saitama, Japan: a three-story detached house in which the third floor is set apart as a chapel for prayer and for the keeping of sacred objects. It is a private place of prayer and is not open to the public without appointment. Here we receive, protect, and preserve old sacred objects—crucifixes, statues, vestments, liturgical books, and other devotional articles—that have lost the churches, religious houses, or families that once kept them. We hold them in trust, record where they came from, and do not sell them.

KIBOJO: Our Principal Work

IHS Bethlehem Church is an honest, nonprofit church, and its principal work is KIBOJO (希望王女, “Princess of Hope”), a body of church works made as an expression of faith.

Through KIBOJO we create works and publish them in the media to speak against war, to stand for peace, and to take hope as their theme. These are the works of a church, not the products of a business.

No money arises from this work in any form. We accept no payment, fee, reward, or compensation of any kind, and the corporation does not hold, and will never hold, a corporate bank account.

Our production team is made up entirely of volunteers and of individuals who take part of their own free will; the corporation is an organization of such voluntary work, and its main activity is creation and production.

For us, art is the monastic life itself.

Art and Media as Expressions of Faith: Star of Mary

Our Articles ask us to encourage art and media as expressions of faith. Star of Mary is our answer to that request. It is the name of the genre under which the Church creates its works: web comics, illustrated stories, and digital media that speak of faith to anyone, anywhere, in any language the Church can manage.

The name is taken from a title of the Blessed Virgin. We chose it because a star is something you steer by, not something you own. Every work under this name is made by the Church and belongs to the Church. No work under this name is a commercial product. No work under this name carries a price, a licence for profit, or an advertisement. Nothing that any of these works brings in benefits a private person.

The first work in this genre is Star of Mary ChristmasFantasy. It is a nonprofit international media work: a web comic and digital media work created and published by IHS Bethlehem Church, released to the world without charge, as an expression of faith. We make it for one reason, which we will state as plainly as we can.

We make it to restore ancient holiness and the sacred nature of things.

By ancient holiness we mean the sense, once common and now rare, that the created world is holy before anyone decides to make it so: that the sky is holy, that the seasons are holy, that the turning of the year toward Christmas is holy, and that none of this needs to be purchased, branded, or improved. By the sacred nature of things we mean the conviction that a star, a night, a birth, and a feast have a nature given to them, and that art which forgets this does not describe the world but only decorates it.

We are aware that this is an unusual reason to make a comic. Most media is made to be sold, and most media that is not sold is made to sell something else. Star of Mary ChristmasFantasy is neither. It is a work that lives by the love of God. We mean that literally: it exists because God is love, and a work can be sustained by that love without a market, a sponsor, or an audience of any particular size. If one person reads it and remembers that the sky is holy, the work has done what it was made to do.

We are also careful about what the work is not. It is not the Church’s teaching itself. It is a story inspired by Scripture and the Christian year; it is a work of imagination, and we say so on every page where it matters. We do not present invented events as revelation, and we do not present the Church’s doctrine as fiction. The two are kept apart, in the same way our observation records keep measurement apart from impression.

Where the night sky appears in the work, it is drawn from our own observation records. A star in the story is a star we have measured. A nebula is one we have imaged. This is a small discipline, but we keep it, because a church that will invent a sky to make a better picture has already given up on the one that was given.

Righteousness Not Yet

There is one conviction underneath all of this that we want to state openly, because it explains why we do what we do and why we do it the way we do.

IHS Bethlehem Church holds that righteousness does not yet live in this world.

We do not say this in despair, and we do not say it as an accusation against anyone. We say it as the reason for everything we do. We observe the sky and write down what is there, because the sky does not lie, and in a world where righteousness has not yet arrived, a record that does not lie is worth keeping. We make our works, because a work can carry what the world does not yet hold: it can show a sky that is holy to people who have been told that nothing is. We serve, because mercy is what we can do while we wait.

The heavens declare the glory of God. The earth has not yet caught up. We live in that distance, and we work there. We do not promise to close it. We promise only to keep looking up, to keep recording honestly, and to keep making things that point in the right direction.

Operating Worldwide

Our Articles describe a corporation that operates worldwide through churches and missions. We are far from that today, and we say so. But the shape of our work is already international by design. Our observations are made with a remote telescope on another continent and submitted to bodies that gather records from observers in every country. Our works are published in English and Italian, and are meant to be read by anyone with a screen. Our corporation is organized in California, and the Star of Mary project has a base in Hawaii. We do not have a building. We have a sky, which is the same from everywhere, and a set of works, which can go anywhere.

We think this is the right order. Buildings follow work; they do not precede it. When there is a community that needs a place, we will find one. Until then, the mission does not wait for the architecture.

Where We Are Now

The corporation is in its start-up stage, and we will keep saying so until it is no longer true. KIBOJO is in production by our volunteer team. The first work of Star of Mary, Star of Mary ChristmasFantasy, is in production and will be released without charge. Our small observation record continues alongside. Other areas of our mission—pastoral care, charity, education beyond this site—will be added as the corporation grows, and not before we can do them properly.

We publish activity reports on this site so that anyone can see what we have actually done, as distinct from what we intend. A mission statement that is not checked against a record of activity is only a wish. We would rather be a small corporation with an honest record than a large one with a beautiful page.

Our Standing

IHS Bethlehem Church is an independent religious corporation founded in the Catholic tradition. It is not affiliated with, and does not act under the authority of, any diocese or the Holy See. We say this clearly so that no one mistakes our explanations of Catholic faith and worship for official teaching of the Catholic Church, and so that no one mistakes our works for anything other than what they are: the sincere expression of an independent religious body that loves the tradition it was founded in.

Where we explain the sacraments, the liturgical calendar, or the history of faith and science, we explain; we do not claim authority. Where we make art, we make art; we do not claim revelation. Where we observe, we observe; we do not claim discovery we have not made. Keeping these lines clear is part of our mission, not a limitation on it.

A Nonprofit Corporation

This corporation is not organized for the private gain of any person. Its property is irrevocably dedicated to its religious purposes, and no part of its net income or assets benefits any director, officer, member, or private person. Should the corporation ever be dissolved, its remaining assets are to be distributed to another organization with similar religious purposes, as the law of California requires.

We publish our Articles of Incorporation and our corporate profile on this site so that anyone may verify what we have written here. We ask to be held to them.

How to Take Part

You do not need to join anything to take part in this mission. Read KIBOJO and the works of Star of Mary as they are released, and share them. If you wish to write to us, our contact page is open. We do not accept money, donations, or compensation of any kind, and we never will.

The sky is already declaring. We are only trying to listen, to record, and to pass on what we hear. That is the whole of our mission, and we do not intend to add to it.