Oh, the Catholic Church _is_ a country, in the form of the Vatican.
(It retains a highly circuitous and squiggly-line but unbroken link to the Roman Empire!)
That's what they try to do in Expanse anyway. Build a generational ship to try and jet out to their own system light years away.
Yeah the irony here is getting regulated by a government that demands more, still goes into awe inspiring amounts of debt, still manages to flirt with defaulting on it, and whose leaders get even wealthier.