Dear Father Purcaro,

I was sorry to hear of your friend Leo’s cancer diagnosis, but happy to hear that his surgery was successful!  I wish him a full and uneventful recovery.  This has brought to mind a long-simmering (and much lighter) theological question I have had for decades, but which has recently become much more urgent.

As Pontifex Maximus, Pope Leo inherits the office which administers the addition of days to the calendar. This function is largely obsolete, but we (meaning humans) are still occasionally adding leap seconds to the year to compensate for Earth’s variable rotation.

Does it fall under Pope Leo’s purview as Pontifex Maximus to bless these leap seconds as they occur?  And if so, does he have a position on  this week’s upcoming vote by the General Conference on Weights and Measures that proposes abolishing leap seconds entirely beginning in May 2027? (And crucially, this cut-off would be before the next possible leap second would be added, making 2016 the last human leap second, potentially forever.)

One additional wrinkle: a big push for this ‘reform’ (that in fact deforms time’s adherence to Earth’s rotation) seems to come from financial institutions objecting that leap seconds cause problems with continuously compounding interest, and the very real possibility (estimated at 30%) that we would be required to add a negative leap second by 2035 due to a variation in Earth’s rotation. It seems that these institutions find the prospect of negative interest to be a cross too great for them to bear. To these institutions, the implications of a negative leap second are like moving a certain stepladder in Jerusalem.

(Also because computer programmers often treat GMT and UTC as if they are the same thing, adding seconds can make our satnavs malfunction.)

Would Pope Leo bless a hypothetical negative leap second? That is very akin to blessing a harvest of negative one apples. The Pontifex Maximus concerns itself with additions to timekeeping, not changes to it, so such a blessing may need to be jammed in under a sideways justification. For context, the year 1900 not being a leap year was directly caused by Pope Gregory XIII, so remaining neutral may not be an option here.

There is, I’m sure, existing Church theological doctrine and boilerplate for the sacredness of days and time… does that factor into your judgement? And what about simply allowing the clock to fall more than 0.9 seconds out of sync with Earth’s rotation until the next leap second a few years later would offset the negative second… basically letting things ride until the rare temporal recession passes on its own. Would simply waiting on the negative leap seconds be halal?

I appreciate your attention on this matter. This is genuinely a theological question that has bothered me since I was a young boy and learned the Pope’s offices included authority over extra time. A superpower which I’m sure we can both agree is under-utilised.

I mean… ‘Double Christmas’ has to be a constant temptation, right?

—Ryan Fogarty
Catholic, sci-fi writer who works on Doctor Who spin-offs

P.S. Sorry for troubling you with this, but the pending ruling on possibly abolishing leap seconds made this a matter of some urgency. It was down to either asking you or Father Guido Sarducci, and I question his qualifications.

P.P.S. Speaking of qualifications, the post-nominal ‘STD’ is very unfortunate. You might want to get that taken care of.

P.P.P.S. I am aware that time is not actually being ‘added’ or ‘deleted’; we are simply changing which bucket of time the ontological seconds go into by human referent, and in that sense, leap seconds may be theologically null.

P.P.P.P.S. …but what about the Angels of the Hours? As angels are divine emanations, these angels uniquely do derive from the human time-referent! Does altering the buckets into which time is sorted alter the angels as immutable embodiments, or are they instantiations of the concept as it is understood at the time of their creation, with Angels of an Hour created before and after a leap second possessing a subtly different nature? Are there more senior Angels of the Hour whose nature is still dictated by dividing daylight into 12 hours regardless of actual length? Do they still resent how the Gregorian reforms left their nature out of step with their offices? Are human timekeepers ruffling their feathers?

Final Postscript — On a (slightly) more serious question, I genuinely am curious… is there a theological aspect to the general goal of keeping the human UTC clock within 0.9 seconds of the Earth’s variable rotation? Is this synchronisation a virtue in itself, or an elevation of alignment over the objective nature of reality where no seconds are added or subtracted, but simply numbered in a continuous stack since January 1, 1970 and stored in a warehouse in Greenwich?

And should I be addressing this inquiry to the Pontifex Maximus, or to this ‘Green Witch’ people keep mentioning who seems to have authority? That sounds like temporal paganism.