Robert Randall

Here's a tidbit I found among Dani Zweig's "Belated Reviews:"

"Also noteworthy is "The Shrouded Planet" by "Robert Randall". (Robert Randall is the name Robert Silverberg and Randall Garrett used for their collaborations.) The Shrouded Planet is the cloud-covered planet of Nidor, home to a stable, low-tech culture -- and the only other intelligent beings discovered by Earth. For reasons of its own, Earth decides to set Nidor, willy nilly, on the road to science and technology. Playing the emissaries-from-above gambit, they open a school. Of theology. With a bit of science and engineering thrown in."

The book was first published in 1957. Randall Garrett is better known for his Lord Darcy stories. According to Wikipedia, he belonged to the Old Catholic Church and was ordained in that denomination. According to this witty article by Robert Silverberg, however, Garrett was an Anglican. (As I understand it, Old Catholics are in full communion with Anglicanism, so perhaps both statements are correct.)

The Silverberg article is well worth reading, as he explains his long-time desire to become Pope Sixtus the Sixth, and what sorts of things he would do as Pope. He discusses the intriguing book that first sparked this ambition, a strange 1904 novel entitled Hadrian the Seventh, in which an obscure English layman unexpectedly becomes the Pope and sets about fixing the world.