The Catholic Church and Time

The Catholic Church has always had a deep interest in the philosophy and measurement of time. In the early Middle Ages, Augustine and Boethius made important contributions to the philosophy of time. Augustine may have been the first to grasp and explain the relative nature of time. In response to a question about why God waited so long to create the word, Augustine wrote that time is a component of creation and that before the beginning there was no time. The question, therefore, was superfluous. Boethius expanded on this concept by giving a proper definition of eternity. In his Consolation of Philosophy, he defined eternity as "the complete, simultaneous and perfect possession of everlasting life."

Another important contribution from the early Middle Ages was the B.C./A.D. schema invented by the monk Dionysius in the sixth century, and popularized by Saint Bede the Venerable in the eighth century. As Fr. Christopher Rengers writes in his book The 33 Doctors of the Church, after Dionysius and Bede made the birth of Christ the centerpiece of history, this reckoning of time soon took root in England. From there "it went via English missionaries and teachers, and Bede's own works, to the Continent. Adoption by Charlemagne, and in the century following him by the Popes, brought it into universal use in the West."

The first clocks were invented by churchmen in the Middle Ages, and they were in common use in cathedrals, monasteries and town halls by the thirteenth century. Thomas E. Woods describes a few of the first clocks in his book How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization:

The first clock of which we have any record was built by the future Pope Sylvester II for the German town of Magdeburg, around the year 996. Much more sophisticated clocks were built by later monks. Peter Lightfoot, a fourteenth-century monk of Glastonbury, built one of the oldest clocks still in existence, which now sits, in excellent condition, in London’s Science Museum.

He continues:

Richard of Wallingford, a fourteenth-century abbot of the Benedictine abbey of Saint Albans (and one of the initiators of Western trigonometry), is well known for the large astronomical clock he designed for that monastery. It has been said that a clock that equaled it in technological sophistication did not appear for at least two centuries. The magnificent clock, a marvel for its time, no longer survives, perhaps having perished amid Henry VIII’s sixteenth-century monastic confiscations. However, Richard’s notes on the clock’s design have permitted scholars to build a model and even a full-scale reconstruction. In addition to timekeeping, the clock could accurately predict lunar eclipses.”

The Church's most notable contribution to timekeeping, however, was the introduction of the Gregorian Calendar in the late sixteenth century. The commission to reform the calendar was organized by Pope Gregory the VIII and the main architect of the project was the Jesuit priest Christopher Clavius. When it was all said and done, ten days were removed from the month of October in 1582, and the calendar was again in line with the solar year. Catholic countries quickly adopted the reformed calendar, but Protestant and Eastern Orthodox countries were remarkably slow in implementing it. For example, England did not adopt the calendar until 1752, and many of the Eastern Europeans waited until the early 20th century!