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.

This was originally an opening for something larger which will never be finished, but it reads perfectly well on its own.

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Oskar had meant for the rock to kill Hans when he threw it.  He had not wanted the other boy dead — not consciously — but they had been arguing, and Hans had insulted Oskar’s father, saying he had raised Oskar as a delinquent.  A flush of anger had taken over him, and Oskar had flung the chunk of flint as hard as he could.  It had missed his classmate’s head by a scant three inches… and sailed over the low wall to strike the Schoolmaster’s greenhouse, where he cultivated his prize orchids.  The glass broke and fell, and Oskar knew that he was in a great deal of trouble.

What was worse, two other boys from school had witnessed the incident and they were sure to tell on him. Oskar had almost run away back to Sieben Eichen, but he clung — illogically — to the hope that he might somehow wriggle out of the punishment.

(In his mind, the destruction of the orchids was a much more serious crime than the maybe-attempted murder of Hans.  And anyway, he had missed, so maybe he had not meant to hit him.  Oskar was very good at throwing rocks, after all.)

By lunchtime Oskar had made himself so sick with worry that he was unable to eat, even though the lunchlady had made his favorite Kartoffeltaschen.  Oskar approached Hans, who was sitting with a few other boys, including Fritz, Oskar’s older cousin.

“Grüß Gott, Verdammter.” Fritz said to him.  Greetings, reprobate.

Oskar sneered at his God-fearing cousin. “I am speaking to Hans.”

He put his tray down upon the table across from the boy he had most definitely not attempted to kill this morning.

“Would you like one of my potato cakes?”

Hans eyed him skeptically.  “What is wrong with you?”

Oskar shrugged.  “What is wrong with you, Barbräfelden?”  He bit back his temper.  “I would like to… not hear you speak.”

Oskar tried to communicate his meaning with his eyes, not wishing to discuss the matter in front of the others — to say nothing of his goody-good cousin.  “Perhaps I could… fill your mouth?”

His cousin was taking a bite as he said this, and Fritz began to cough violently, a wild smile on his face and his eyes sparkling as he waved his friend Heinrich off.

“Oskar —” he coughed, “I did not think —”

“Schnauze, du Hund!” Oskar snapped.

His cousin’s wit was not appreciated, and Oskar felt his face reddening.

Hans asked, “Did you lick this cake?”

“Nein.”

Julius spoke up from the end of the table.  “Did you touch it with your penis?”

“No!” Oskar shouted, nearly grabbing the cake and hurling it at the insulting boy.  But he grabbed the edge of the table instead and held himself in place.  Julius was one of the two boys who had witnessed him throwing the rock at the greenhouse.

Hans licked his lips as he considered Oskar’s offer — a potato cake for his silence.

These Kartoffeltaschen were a sought-after commodity in the lunchroom.  The cakes were the specialty of Madame Göre, the new lunchlady.  All of her food was superior to that of the old bat she had replaced, but the Kartoffeltaschen were transcendent.  Savory cakes stuffed with cheese and vegetables and lightly fried, they were an instant favorite of all the boys at school, including thirteen-year-olds Oskar and Hans.

But she only gave each student three tiny cakes, served with parsimonious portions of sour cream and spicy sauce, so barter for them was common practice.  One cake might buy you a copy of someone’s homework.  Two, a volume of scandalous manga. And for three…?

Well, Cousin Fritz’s lewd comment was not without precedent among the older boys.  But one did not discuss this.

Oskar waited for Hans’s reply, aching amid the sounds of the lunchroom — murmured conversations spiked by adolescent expletives and the clank of metal silverware on trays.

With a sigh, Hans relented and accepted his bribe.  He slid one of the Kartoffeltaschen off Oskar’s tray and onto his own. Oskar breathed a sigh of relief, and his stomach unknotted.

Julius, several seats down, cleared his throat.

Of course.  Oskar walked over to Julius, and the older boy gleefully took the second Kartoffeltasche from his tray.

Cousin Fritz eyed the exchange. “ Oskar, what have you done?”

Dulya.  Oskar left his cousin and his friends and went to seek out Franz.

There was one more witness to be bribed.

The vomit dripping down the slide was a vivid scarlet.  And not beets or cranberry juice, the oily red of blood.  Sebastian was vomiting blood.

His cruelty forgotten, Oskar shouted, “You stay here, I will fetch someone!” and then rapidly turned and ran towards the schoolhouse, his heart pounding.  A look back showed that Sebastian had fallen off the side of the slide and was now heaving his guts out — bright and red like fast-flowing honey.  Surely he could not have that much blood inside him.  Or if he did, it must remain inside.

He reached the schoolhouse with a cry, not bothering to put his mobile phone away.  And when he got there he discovered Julius, his cousin’s friend.   He was slumped against the lockers and vomiting.  The nasty slurry was coming out orange, like the yellow of vomit mixed with some blood, less than Seb’s.  There was a growing slick of vomit around the fifteen-year-old’s feet and —

Oskar knew that the orange bits in vomit that looked like carrots were not carrots.  They were chunks of your stomach lining.  When you sicked, some bits broke off and came up with the sick. But those were little chunks, like a piece of macaroni or a slice of carrot.  There were three chunks in the vomit slick the size of playing cards.  Julius coughed and gagged and another section, easily 8 centimeters on a side, fell from his lips.  The boy’s stomach was coming apart and he was literally choking on it.  Julius stared at Oskar with pleading eyes.  “Help.”

Oskar ran.  There was another slick of the stuff down the hall which he ignored, and more seen in the classrooms where, falscher Gott, two students were slumped over their desks, not moving!

He skidded around the corner and discovered the schoolmaster, the very one he had been so afraid of earlier, crumpled in the hallway amid his own bloody sick.  The schoolmaster was not breathing.

Oskar took out his phone and dialed 112 Emergency.

Later, after a breathless conversation with a shaken-sounding Emergency Operator, Oskar was just wandering the halls while the man on the phone wittered, surveying the carnage that had once been his school.  There were a few other students who had survived, crying and not knowing what to do.  He handed the phone to one of them numbly and continued to wander until he found what he knew he inevitably must.

His cousin Fritz’s eyes fluttered, fixing blearily upon him.  There was blood and stomach parts all down the front of his school shirt and he could not speak.  He reached out an imploring hand to him.

Oskar watched his cousin die until the flashing police lights came.

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