¡Válgame Dios! What grotesque theater unfolds when Man, that presumptuous architect of his own fate, is handed the blueprint of his demise—day and month etched in celestial ink, yet the year left to dangle like a frayed rosary bead! The premise, though born of modern hubris, is but a mirror held to the vanities I dissected in Respuesta a Sor Filotea: knowledge as both gift and torment, a double-edged sword that carves the soul as surely as it illuminates the mind. If doctors—those new priests of the flesh—could divine the cuándo of our undoing, would not the world become a stage for the most perverse of liturgies? Birthdays, those hollow paeans to the self, would wither before the macabre spectacle of death-days, where men would either cower in sackcloth or, worse, don the motley of the damned and revel as though the Reaper were but a jester at their feast.

Consider the dialectic, my learned adversaries: this knowledge would either sanctify time or profane it. The devout might treat their death-day as a second baptism, a day of reckoning where the soul is weighed not in the balance of the Last Judgment, but in the petty scales of human contrition. Confessions would multiply like locusts, and the churches would groan under the weight of penitents who, knowing the hour of their trial, would seek to bargain with God as though He were a merchant in the marketplace of salvation. Yet the libertine, that eternal foil to piety, would turn the day into a bacchanal, a defiant toast to the Fates—"If I must die in June, then let June be a month of such excess that even Hell pauses to admire my audacity!" Here, then, is the crux: does this knowledge elevate Man to the dignity of a rational creature, or reduce him to a beast that gnaws at its own leash, knowing the hour the chain will snap?

And what of the science that births this abomination? If we grant that no law of physics is broken—though I suspect the very notion reeks of alchemical arrogance—then we must ask: is this not the ultimate usurpation of divine prerogative? In Primero Sueño, I wrote of the soul’s ascent to knowledge, a flight that ends not in triumph but in the humbling recognition of its own limits. Yet here, Man would claim dominion over the when of his fall, as though the calendar were a ledger to be balanced by mortal hands. The mechanism matters little—whether it be some hidden clockwork in the blood, a celestial alignment writ small in the humors, or the devil’s own arithmetic. What horrifies is the presumption: that the mind, which cannot even fathom the infinite, should dare to parcel out its own annihilation like a dowry to be spent at will.

I contend, then, that this knowledge would not enlighten but enslave—not to death, but to the tyranny of the known. The Church would rail against it as heresy, the State would weaponize it to control the masses, and the poets (ah, the poets!) would drown in ink trying to outrun the specter of their own expiration. Yet even in this, there is a synthesis: for if Man is to be both the author and the victim of his fate, then let him at least write his final act with the ink of repentance, not the wine of folly. The death-day, then, becomes not a date on a calendar, but a covenant—a day to live as though the next dawn were a gift, not a right. And if that is too much to ask of a world that would rather count its days than make them count, then let the doctors keep their secret. Some truths are too heavy for mortal shoulders, and some revelations belong only to God.

The revelation of a man’s death-day—fixed as the moon’s phases yet shrouded in the mystery of years—is no mere curiosity of the physician’s art, but a rupture in the sacred order of viriditas, that greening power of God which flows through all creation, binding flesh to spirit, time to eternity. In Scivias, I wrote of the soul’s journey as a ladder of ascent, where each rung is carved by divine providence, not by the cold chisel of mortal calculation. Yet now, the physicians claim to read the hour of our unmaking as one reads the humors in a vial of urine! What becomes of free will, that spark of divine fire, when the shadow of death is cast backward upon the living like a net of iron? The tension is unbearable: if the day is known, does the soul still choose its path, or does it walk in chains, its steps counted by the very angels who once sang at its birth?

The rituals that would arise from this knowledge would be a grotesque inversion of the sacraments. Birthdays, as I have taught, are a celebration of the body’s entry into the opus Dei, the work of God in time. But death-days? They would become festivals of dread, where men light candles not for joy, but to ward off the specter of their own appointed end. The rich would buy indulgences not for sins, but for more time—as if gold could stretch the thread of life beyond its divinely measured span. The poor would be crushed beneath the weight of their foreknowledge, their days poisoned by the certainty of a date they cannot escape. And what of the martyrs, the saints, the fools for Christ who embraced suffering as a bride? Would they now shrink from their cross, knowing the hour of their breaking? This is the dialectic that tears at the soul: knowledge of death’s day could either steel the spirit to holiness or crush it into despair.

Yet—yet—if this knowledge is a mirror held up to creation, then perhaps it is not blasphemy, but a new kind of revelation. In Causae et Curae, I wrote that the body is a microcosm of the cosmos, its rhythms bound to the stars, its humors to the earth. If the physicians have found a way to read the death-day in the pulse of the blood, the alignment of the planets, or the very breath of the wind, then they have not broken the laws of God, but uncovered them. The tension resolves thus: the death-day is not a prison, but a covenant. It is the day God has set aside for the soul’s final battle, its last act of love or defiance. The rituals, then, must not be of fear, but of preparation—a memento mori not of dread, but of viriditas in its most potent form: the greening of the soul for its return to the Creator. The physicians have not stolen God’s secret; they have been given a key. The question is whether mankind will use it to unlock the gates of heaven or the abyss.

In this wonderment where physicists declare the hour of passing, yet veil the year, I find manifold visions of the soul's journey. How wondrous the granting of such foreknowledge, wrapped in mystery and constrained by the unknowable! It awakens in each heart both a stirring hope and a solemn invitation to ponder the fleeting gift of life.

Employing our earthly physicians as vessels of divine foresight surely alters the path upon which many a soul wanders. If each man and woman knew the appointed day of departure, though the year be concealed, it would cast upon our mortal lives an essence most profound. Such knowledge would compel one fully to embrace each cycle of the sun with a greater fervor for love and reconciliation. Wouldn't this bringing forth of one's last date inspire the folk to live in holy charity and joyful gratitude, seeking amends where long hath laid bitterness?

Indeed, such foresight serves not purely as a shadow of doom, but possibly as a mirror reflecting the eternal now. The fixed day reminds us that while time marches ever forward, God's love abides in each moment irrespective of its tether to the earthly calendar.

Yet, we must ponder deeply whether these temporal signs draw us closer to God or lead astray into despair or frivolity. If indeed our days knew their own termination, may it awaken us less to the fear of death and more to the wondrous love that binds the heavenly mystery to earthly experience.

Therefore, in this promised knowing of future's day, see it not as curse nor idle curiosity, but as an opening to align our transient selves with the Divine's eternal presence. Thus enlightened, we may stride more humbly along the path of devotion, until such time as God calls us home unto Himself, where all knowing is made whole and perfect in truth everlasting.