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Happy Friday friends,
Today is of course the 25th anniversary of the 2001 September 11 attacks. It is a good moment to pause for thought and prayer for the thousands who lost their lives that day. And of course for the many thousands more who have fallen in the more-or-less unceasing conflicts since. Most especially, I try to remember the men and women, both here stateside and back in the UK, who responded to that changed world by enlisting to serve.
Though it is old hat to say it, it remains the case that 9/11 was the day the world began to self-sort, at least in my eyes, between those willing to die for what they held dear, and those willing to kill to further their demands. There are, the Didache opens by reminding us, only two ways, the way of life and the way of death, and great is the distance between them.
For me and people of my vintage, it was also the big dividing line drawn across our lives.
Almost literally and legally, my transition from child to adult coincided with that day. Before that was a different time, and in many respects a different world.
Since then, we’ve become accustomed, at least to a degree necessarily, to our now ubiquitous security culture. We have all grown used to carrying photo IDs, removing our shoes and discarding bottled water before entering public spaces and airports. Crash barriers, some artfully disguised, some not so much, are now the defining decoration of prominent buildings and squares.
After 25 years, the memory of the before time, when loved ones could see you all the way to the airplane gate to waive you off and lost bags didn’t trigger lockdowns, has dimmed a lot, for those of us who remember it at all. Increasingly I have begun to accept that there might not be any going back, ever. After all, there is now an entire generation of adults walking the working world who have never known any different.
That’s kind of a shocking realization, for me, anyway. What does it do to us as a civilization to have a slow generational turnover which, in another 25 years, will mean the whole of society has only ever experienced life in a state of constant vigilance against spontaneous mass attack?
I have to think that a quarter of a century in which we approach public life and gatherings with a quasi-siege mentality has had real consequences for how we treat each other, and how we conceive of ourselves as “a people” — if we still can. Perhaps that is the hermeneutical key we are all reaching for to decode the drum beat of anger, suspicion, and resentment which defines so much of our culture now, and has done for… well, about 25 years.
Of course, diagnosis doesn’t produce a prescription, ipso facto. And it isn’t as if the world has become a safer place since 2001. I guess the closest I come to any kind of inchoate answer to all we see is this: there are still only two kinds of people, deep down, those who will lay down their lives and those who would kill. Perhaps the only thing we can do is to repeatedly ask ourselves, in the shadow of all that has been and is, “which one am I?” And, perhaps more importantly, which do we wish to be?
Anyway, here’s the news.
The News
Lawyers for an English bishop have filed a motion to dismiss the charges of rape of a minor, with a new hearing set for January.
Bishop David Oakley of Northampton appeared in court at the Old Bailey in London on Sept. 10. He had been expected to enter a plea in the case, in which he is charged with two counts of rape of a minor, as well as indecent assault charges. The bishop appeared in lay clothes and is not currently in ministry, although he remains bishop of the diocese
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Temperatures climbed so high in France this summer that wildfires forced mass evacuations, Champagne grapes were harvested exceptionally early, the Louvre closed in the afternoons, and the field at the historic Parc des Princes stadium turned brown.
With the mercury peaking at 111 degrees Fahrenheit, only the brave would consider embarking on a month-long tour involving hours of manual labor in direct sunlight. But that is exactly what Raphaël Castex did.
Castex spent August engaged in what he called a Tour de France du Patrimoine, or heritage tour of France. This involved traveling thousands of miles on a Honda motorcycle, stopping in towns and villages with the goal of renovating a total of 20 dilapidated religious statues over the month.
Castex, a calmly spoken figure with a fighter pilot mustache, is a co-founder of Rénove une Statue (Renovate a Statue), an association created in 2024 to restore the crumbling images of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the saints that can be found all over France.
Read all about their work here.
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The Andorran Prime Minister has announced a plan to decriminalize abortion in the microstate by April next year “whether the Holy See likes it or not,” despite a Catholic bishop serving as co-head of state.
Xavier Espot, the Andorran PM, announced the plan in a Sept. 8 interview, saying that after years of tense talks between the Vatican and the government on the issue of abortion dialogue with the Holy See will continue but “with our sights set on the upcoming parliamentary session and, therefore, with the assurance that we can pass legislation to decriminalize abortion.”
The country’s government has been in negotiations with the Holy See for years in an attempt to secure at least tacit approval for decriminalizing abortion, as the country’s co-head of state is the Bishop of Urgell, Bishop Josep Lluís Serrano Pentinat, the territory of which covers Andorra.
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This week a Spanish newspaper published alleged letters from Pope Francis, suggesting the late pope supported the bishop of Barbastro in a dispute with Opus Dei about the Marian shrine in his diocese.
The publication of the leaked letters comes just days after Bishop Ángel Pérez Pueyo, SOD, of Barbastro threatened to resign – for a second time – over the dispute. The leaking of the letters — which many are blaming on the bishop himself — adds another layer of complication to the already complex situation.
But what is Bishop Pérez Pueyo hoping to accomplish at this point, and is he likely to succeed?
You can read Edgar Beltran’s whole analysis about it right here.
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Just over a week ago, Pope Leo issued a major change to the Code of Canons for the Eastern Churches, the body of law governing the 23 Eastern Churches in full communion with Rome.
Leo gave the synods of those churches headed by patriarchs the power to impeach their heads for failing to preserve or severely damaging the Church’s communion. As you probably remember, JD and I wrote about it at the time and we were both pretty skeptical of the new law — its intentions, drafting, and likely implementation.
But we like people who are smarter than us, know more, and disagree with us. And we especially like it when they write for The Pillar. So, this week, I am really chuffed we get to bring you this commentary on Leo’s law for the Eastern Churches by the professor who taught me about the Eastern Code in canon law school, Chorbishop John Faris.
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A group of more than 200 victims of spiritual abuse and their relatives is asking Pope Leo XIV to take concrete steps to prevent and respond to instances of spiritual abuse within the Church.
In a Sept. 7 letter, published in La Croix, the group asked the pope to clearly define spiritual abuse in canon law, establish independent bodies to receive reports of spiritual abuse, and ensure that new postulants in religious communities receive training about their own rights and responsibilities.
Making spiritual abuse a defined crime in canon law has been the particular priority of Cardinal Fernandez as prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, and I have to say I’ve agreed with him about the need, for years.
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The waiting game
Rome is back from summer vacation and, I think it is fair to say, expectations are beginning to mount around the Vatican.
No one, at least no one reasonable, expected Pope Leo to come out of the conclave hard and fast last year and make a slew of changes at the very top of his curia, however urgently they might be wished for by some people in some cases. But now into the pope’s second September, expectations are mounting, and increasingly reasonably so.
By my count, six of the current heads of curial dicasteries are past the nominal Vatican retirement age of 75, with one more to hit the milestone before Christmas. That number is actually a bit higher in terms of departmental heads when you consider the oldest of the cadre, Cardinal Kevin Farrell, actually has multiple jobs.
And, while the most senior curial figure, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, is still a few years off from 75, it’s the standard expectation that a change at the top of the Secretariat of State is in the offing, too.
All this points to a major reshuffle coming soon to the Vatican’s top table. But when, exactly, is anyone’s guess. The rumor mill in Rome is in full swing. Some claim Leo is still privately sussing out his preferred promotions and deciding what he thinks of some of the cardinals he’s inherited from Pope Francis. Others are putting it about that key appointments have been held up because some papal picks have actually said “no thanks” to the offer of a big job and a red hat.
At best, it’s a bit of informed guesswork parsing where, exactly, in the process of reimagining his team the pope is. And I am not sold there’s much mileage to speculating, other than for entertainment value. But it is fair to say that when it comes to papal governance, personnel is policy, as much or more than any motu proprio which Leo might sign or speech he might give.
So, I along with a lot of other people are waiting with baited breath to see what the pope will do and when. Until we know whom he is trusting to implement it, it’s very hard to say exactly what direction Leo is charting for his pontificate.
This isn’t even about the specifics of individual personalities, necessarily.
Robert Prevost was when elected, and to a degree remains as Leo XIV, something of an unknown quantity, in as much as he is many things as a man. He’s an American by birth, obviously. He’s an Augustinian by priesthood and spirituality, and a Latin American, in terms of his experiences as a diocesan bishop. He had a few years under his belt in Rome, too, as a curial cardinal. It’s reasonable to expect all these influences to show in his picks to work closest with him, but how and where will color a lot of perceptions about how Leo sees himself.
We are, I think, still within the boundaries of “new pope taking his time” and not into the realm of an apparent paralysis — either of indecision or for want of good choices. But I think this Autumn term is about the limit of that period.
What can be said is that, whatever the reason is for Leo taking his time over making major new appointments, one option is increasingly off the table — one I’d have thought Leo would have preferred above all else — the chance to make incremental change. The benefit of incremental change is that it makes it harder to read too much into any one appointment, and gives the pope a chance to manage expectations and reactions. Even if, for example, Leo wanted to appoint a very slanted (ecclesiologically or geographically) set of cardinal prefects, spacing them out would allow him to balance perceptions with, for example, lower level appointments of a different kind.
Maybe Leo does, in fact, want to make one big clean sweep and reset his Vatican in his own image. But having to replace seven or eight red heads all at once is a very different exercise than flipping them one at a time over a period of a year or more. It means that, whenever the change comes, the big picture will be a lot more visible all at once.
This is equally true regarding some senior episcopal replacements coming, in fact now long overdue, in major archdioceses around the world — Chicago, Barcelona, Milan being three of the most obvious, which Edgar and I talked about on the show this week.
All this gathering expectation and accumulating pressure for one big set of appointments is, by no means, necessarily a bad thing, if that’s what Leo wants. It is worth noting, though, because with every week and month that goes by, the changes become more and more significant, whenever they come.
Out of time
Next month, the General Conference on Weights and Measures will meet in Versailles. I presume we are all familiar with the important work of the GCWM? No?
OK, well it is an international body for setting global standards on, obviously, weighing and measuring things. That might not sound like glamorous work but it is actually phenomenally important for keeping the global economy and general human civilization ticking along together. As such, it’s one of those rare international bodies that pretty much everyone actually shows up for and agrees to abide by, unlike the International Criminal Court or the UN.
When they get together in the grand palais next month, a very important motion will be on the table — the abolition of leap seconds.
Most people are familiar with leap years, which we use to account quadrennially for the reality that our plant doesn’t complete a solar orbit in exactly 365 days. For those otherwise unaware, we’ve been doing the same with seconds for over 50 years now because, as you might expect, the earth doesn’t turn around in exactly 24 hours, either.
In fact, the earth’s rotation on its axis is something like a planetary heartbeat, it tends to speed up and slow down for all kinds of reasons linked to factors like the state of the outer planetary core, the moon’s gravitational pull, and solar activity.
Apparently, back when the dinosaurs roamed the earth a solar day was more like 23 hours and 30 mins long.
Now, for pretty much all of human history, this variance has been a note of scientific curiosity and nothing more. Up until about a minute ago, in terms of human history, people kept time in their own ways in different parts of the world, though right up until the 1960s, everyone set their watches by Greenwich Mean Time, where the world’s preeminent observatory set the standard for what we in the time game call “observed solar time,” exactly pinpointing the moment the sun in exactly halfway between rising and setting and calling it noon.
Since 1963, though, the world has adopted what we call Coordinated Universal Time, which is a globally broadcast signal aggregated from the precise decay of several atomic clocks which provides a kind of hyperacurate “theoretical time,” as opposed to “observed time.”
UCT (we allow the French the concession of ordering international acronyms) has been essential for all kinds of aspects of our globalized world, and gone from serious convenience to absolute necessity in the digital age. And here’s where the problems set in.
It became pretty obvious early on that OST and UTC were not ticking along at the same rate. In fact, the atomic clock pretty handily outpaced the real world, to the point that in 1972 a sort of mini-reset was needed in the form of a “leap second.” Atomic time was paused for a slow count of ONE-MISSISSIPPI at the stroke of midnight and pretty much no one not directly involved in it was any the wiser, or had reason to take an interest. In total we’ve done this 27 times since ‘72.
But, thanks to the internet age, leap seconds have become progressively harder to manage. In fact, they are getting downright hazardous to try. You might think it’s no big deal to pause “the system” for a second. But, as anyone who understands these things will tell you, we don’t have “a global system” so much as a system of hopelessly intertwined and enmeshed systems. None of them have the capacity to freeze time — that would break them — and the ones that have coping mechanisms don’t all do it in the same ways.
Some insert an extra second at 23:59:60, others count the stroke midnight twice, and some digital frameworks would be so freaked out by the introduction of an extra second that it has to be “smeared” across several hours so they don’t crash, kind of like dragging your finger on a vinyl record to slow the rotation.
None of this is easy, or fool-proof. It goes wrong, and that’s when the rest of us start to notice. Twitter, Amazon, Netflix, and a load of other big brand tech companies bugged out with the leap second in 2015, and several major international exchanges just shut everything down for an hour, to be on the safe side. In 2012 and 2017, leap seconds caused New Year’s power outages in New York.
As you might expect, as interconnectivity becomes more deeply embedded in everything we buy and use, thanks to the “internet of things,” the risks have gradually escalated from real, to serious, to downright potentially calamitous. So, back in 2023, the GCWM adopted the policy of getting rid of leap seconds by 2035. Unfortunately for them, times have changed since then.
What’s gone on since 2023 is two things. First, the proposed fix for abolishing leap seconds was to move to leap minutes which, as you’d expect, wouldn’t need to be nearly so common. The problem was, some countries — notably Russia — were dead against it because their tech simply doesn’t have the capacity to absorb a leap minute, whenever it might come. You can imagine why a belligerent nuclear power would be touchy about this.
The second issue is that, for the first time in a while, the earth is speeding back up, to the point that a kind of reverse leap second, subtracting rather than adding one to UTC, is needed. Simply put, no one has any ideas about how to create a reverse gear for the systems we have now.
What’s the answer? Basically to just ignore the problem altogether, at least that is the GCWM’s plan.
Instead of sweating the seconds and minutes, the motion next month proposes to move to leap hours, which would only need adjustment every 1,000 years or so, by which point humanity will either have moved away from earth as the center of time, in much the way we already have from Greenwich, or AI will have killed us all and it can figure the problem out for itself.
For me, I have always hated UCT, and the drift between the theory and reality of time the leap hour plan proposes seems monstrous and dehumanizing to me.
The point of time is to mark the progress and decay of our created world — days, solarly speaking, seasons and years are our measure of life’s march. The idea that there is a kind of “perfect time” apart from and above the messy imperfections of the world we live in is a kind of rejection of reality, it seems to me.
I like the idea that our years and months and days and even seconds aren’t perfectly divisible or regular, yet remain the chart we plot ourselves against. It is the best possible reminder that we, all of this universe, were created by a God who saw that it was good, but it is very much not perfect as only He is.
Imperfection is the watermark of reality, of existential authenticity, and ultimately a call to seek the one who alone is perfect. Attempting to manufacture our own standards of perfection and then sit back and watch our world drift away from them because we can’t actually accommodate their demands seems to me like a towering metaphor for the Babelish era we live in.
Anyway, when the GCWM motion is adopted, as it seems certain to be, I’m buying a sextant. Whatever world the computers live in, the difference between that and the one I live in is rapidly becoming day and night.
See you next week,
Ed. Condon
Editor
The Pillar
"...waiting with baited breath."
Should be "bated," as in abated.
The reflection on time is marvelous, and points towards some deep and legitimately important avenues that could bear more thought.
What is, after all, our ever-more-deracinated technologized rationalized world in general but a rejection of and fleeing from the "messy imperfections of the world" in favor of pure new creations sprung from our own sovereign minds...and our own sovereign desires?
(It all stretches back in a straight line to the philosophes and before, of course.)