The faithful elsewhere in Christendom observed holy days of obligation, among them the Solemnity of All Saints and the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, aligned not with the times of planting or plucking up but with the promise of their full value to be realized upon redemption after death by the sublime pawnbroker in the sky. The manufacture and sale of sacred time furnished the Catholic Church with its worldly wealth and sustained its political control of immoral nature made manifest in the sins of both the human spirit and its mortifying flesh. The first mechanical clocks to appear in Italy’s city squares in the thirteenth century were those mounted on church towers, not only to supervise the comings in and goings out of fallible humanity, but also to mark time’s blessed progress toward the triumph of its extinction.
Lewis H. Lapham
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