The icon of the Adeptus Ministorum.
Morst Bolifax is a cardinal of the Adeptus Ministorum who also served as the planetary governor of the Cardinal World of Benediction in the Talledus System of the Veritus Sub-sector and as the sector lord of the sub-sector itself.
Bolifax was known to be a brutal traditionalist of the Imperial Creed. He ruled the system and the sub-sector with an iron hand. Suspicious of the deviations of the Imperial faith that had developed in his domain, Bolifax initiated a series of purges to remove subversive figures who dared to deviate from the unequivocal truth of the Imperial Creed as he saw it.
He sent his most fervent missionaries forth to cleanse these impurities. Shrines and shantytowns were burned, deviant tomes and scriptures seized, and more than ten thousand apostates were crucified or stoned to death for their heathen practices. A dozen sub-cults of the Imperial Creed were condemned as heretical by the cardinal's decree. Anyone found practising their proscribed beliefs or rituals was to be subject to immediate torture and execution.
What remained of these sects were then infiltrated by charismatic orators and zealous iconoclasts in thrall to the Dark Gods, and directed by the masters of the Word Bearers. At first these figureheads preached the supremacy of the God-Emperor. They railed against the tyrannical rule of the Ministorum priests and the purges and executions they had inflicted upon innocent souls for a simple divergence of belief. Stirring up popular anger and a simmering resentment against the cruel Cardinal Bolifax, they compared his excesses to those of the infamous Goge Vandire during the Reign of Blood.
The brutality of Bolifax's crackdown was the perfect gift for the cultist demagogues of the Veritus Sub-sector. By playing upon the climate of fear and hatred, it was almost too easy for them to indoctrinate new followers in the worship of the Chaos God pantheon, and an ever-growing number of disenchanted pilgrims were driven into their clutches. Patiently, they sowed the seeds of true heresy, hiding the nature of their foul beliefs behind metaphor and rhetoric.
When the Word Bearers led the forces of Chaos in the assault on the Talledus System during what became known as the Talledus War, Cardinal Bolifax was granted formal command of the Imperial defence as the Imperial Commander, but had no real role in making the day-to-day strategic decisions of the Imperial forces involved in the conflict.
Sources[]
- Psychic Awakening - Faith and Fury (8th Edition), pp. 10-11