Consider the rituals that shall arise from this abomination: not the joyous feast of birth, where the soul is welcomed into the world with prayers and blessings, but the morbid vigil of the "death-day," where men shall gather not to celebrate life, but to mourn its end before it has even come to pass. Will they fast in penance for sins not yet committed? Will they light candles for a soul not yet departed, as though the altar of God were a counting-house for the damned? In my letters to the prelates of Italy, I railed against the corruption of the Church, where men traded in indulgences as though grace were a commodity. Now, shall we see a new market arise, where the rich purchase potions to delay their doom, while the poor are left to rot in the knowledge of their fate? The Bridge of Christ is not a ledger to be balanced by human hands, but a path of suffering and love, where the soul is refined in the fire of divine justice. To know the day of one’s death is to turn the cross into a calendar, and the Passion into a parlor trick.

Yet—mark me well—for even in this blasphemy, God’s providence may yet work a greater good. If men are to be given this knowledge, let it not be a cause for despair, but for conversion. Let the death-day become a day of reckoning, where each soul examines itself as before the Last Judgment, casting off the rags of sin and donning the armor of repentance. Let the physicians who wield this power be bound by oath to use it not for profit, but for the salvation of souls, that none may die in mortal sin. And let the Church, which has ever been the guardian of the sacred mysteries, reclaim this knowledge from the hands of the proud, and wield it as a sword of truth, to cut away the dead flesh of complacency and awaken the world to the urgency of divine love. For even the darkest night is but the prelude to the dawn, and even the knowledge of death may yet serve the glory of God—if we but have the courage to wield it as He wills.