The Society of St. Leopold

Chicago is a city of faith as much as high finance and haute couture; the Roman Catholic Archdiocese centered on the Holy Name Cathedral serves a flock of more than two million — most of whom are alive, some of whom are not. Scattered among the ecclesiastical ranks, hidden among the priests and nuns, the vicars and deacons, the missionaries in training and the lay brethren, is one of the oldest threats known to the Kindred: the righteous and implacable vampire hunters of the Society of St. Leopold.
Named for their spiritual founder and inspiration, the Dominican friar Leopold von Murnau, the Society has existed in one form or another since the formation of the Holy Inquisition Contra Diabolus enim et alii Daemones in the 13th century CE, the very earliest of the mortal forces to turn their hands to the pursuit and destruction of the Kindred and all their works. The organization has changed shape considerably over the cen-turies as its fortunes have risen and fallen in the regard of cardinals and pontiffs, at some points regarded as an invaluable tool in the battle for men’s souls, in others as an embarrassing relic of the past, best left to molder forgotten in the darkest corner of the Vatican archives available. Never, however, has their mission changed nor has it entirely ceased attracting the service of those in the Church who have looked more deeply into the darkness than most and found horrors gazing back at them, even if their numbers slowly dwindled nearly to extinction over the years.
The Society of St. Leopold is no longer fading away. Since 2008, and the development of the joint program to ferret out and destroy the undead — referred to as “blankbodies” by the sort of individuals who can accept the existence of paranormal entities abroad in the world but can’t bring themselves to speak the word “vampire” aloud — the Society’s membership has swelled from a few dozen to several thousand members worldwide. Their extant mass of accumulated knowledge of the undead, collected and guarded and disseminated down the centuries, has formed the basis of much of the modern research into Kindred physiology and capabilities currently underway in blacksites the world over, now aided by science as well as faith. The organization’s members now primarily function as specialist knowledge resource officers and field investigation agents for joint SOCOM/ ESOG task force operations, the “first boots on the ground” when FIRSTLIGHT’s Analysis Division indicates the need for more information from a suspected nest of “anomalies.”
As a Kindred resident of Chicago, you possess some knowledge of the Society of St. Leopold, how it is organized, and how it functions — or, at the very least, how it did prior to the last decade — and may have some idea how or capacity to ferret out more current information.