9 The Reckoning of the Time in Douai, France for the education of priests who then returned to their native land to celebrate Mass in hiding and confer the sacraments, until such time as the priest-hunters of Queen Elizabeth should seize them and subject them to torture and a gruesome and protracted execution. It is said that Gregory sang the Te Deum when he heard about the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre of Protestant Huguenots in Paris, but there was no Internet in those days, and all that the Pope knew of it was that a political revolt against a legitimate ruler had been put down. He wept when he learned at last what had really happened. The times were also quite literally out of joint. If you ask a hundred people what a year is, you might get half of them to say that it is the time it takes for the earth to make one complete revolution about the sun. The next question is obvious. “How do you know when the earth has done that?” “Well, you look at the calendar.” “And where did the calendar come from? If you didn’t have a calendar, how would you know?” Silence falls, and crickets chirp from the woods. The sun has two apparent motions about the earth. The one is its daily journey from east to west. It is especially long in the summertime, when Mister Apollo the charioteer sweats at high noon, and his steeds long for their watering hole at the border of night.
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