In the past 24 hours, there has been a ton of incoming traffic directed to Justin's brilliant post about Leon Kass ("Leon and Me"), but a Technorati search revealed no immediate incoming links, so I couldn't ascertain the source. I thought to examine the referrer statistics, and I was delighted to discover the traffic was coming from Rand Simberg -- whose blog is Terrestrial Musings, but who had linked Justin's post in a wonderfully ironic Tech Central Station essay called "Habemus Papam... Ad Perpetuitatem?"

The conventional wisdom is that a 78 year old pope will have a short-lived papacy -- a sort of holding pattern, meant only to continue the policies of the previous pope. (In political terms, a rough analogy might be Konstantin Chernenko's short-lived continuation of Leonid Brezhnev's doctrine.)

Mr. Simberg turns the conventional wisdom around with some tough "what if" questions, and asks us to imagine that "a decade or less from now, a breakthrough occurs that cures some underlying, wasting disease from which the new pope might suffer, such as arteriosclerosis, thus buying him an additional decade of life that he might have been denied in its absence....."

But what if they [popes] do [live almost forever]? What are the implications of this for the future of the Church? Or of dictators (who are usually the first in their own nations to take advantage of new medical techniques)? Or the Supreme Court? Or indeed, any position which, in our current finite-lived reality, is defined as a term for life? And what will be the response of the Church in particular, which like most churches, partly grew in response to the innate human fear of death, in a world in which death was commonplace, to a world in which it becomes a rarity, only resulting from severe injuries occurring too far from medical facilities?

Which of its traditions will have to give way to the new technological reality? The Church hierarchy is very learned, but this may be a technological change to which they've given little thought, because since the dawn of humanity it's been unthinkable (and to many, mortality with a life span of a few decades is a defining feature of humanity). If they do somehow draw a line, and declare certain life-extending, life-enhancing therapies to be un-Catholic, how many more will flee a Church that now seemingly wants to not only control their sex lives, but how long they live in good health?

If, as many think, this pope was selected to provide at least a temporary bulwark against modernity, how ironic that one of the features of modern life that he might be having to fight could also be one that could allow his own obstruction to it to be permanent?

But what will happen when the choice becomes actual eternity now, or a faith-based eternity after death?

Such tests of faith don't come often.

Why not play devil's advocate here and now? Should leaps of technology be allowed to postpone leaps of faith?