Determining which is the correct date to celebrate Christ's Resurrection has been the subject of ecumenical debate for hundreds of years. The Gregorian calendar points to one set of rules, the Julian calendar points to another.

It's a debate which many - Francis included - would like to end.

"Easter does not take place by our own initiative or by one calendar or another.

"Easter occurred because God ‘so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life'" Francis said during an audience at the Vatican last week.

"Let us not close ourselves within our own ideas, plans, calendars or ‘our' Easter. Easter belongs to Christ!

"Moreover, it is good for us to ask for the grace to be ever more His disciples, allowing Him to be the one to show us the way we should follow."

One Resurrection for all

The delegation members Francis was addressing were from the ecumenical "Pasqua Together 2025" initiative. Founded in 2022, Pasqua calls on Orthodox and mainline Christian churches to celebrate Easter on a common date.

In Easter 2025, the Julian and Gregorian calendars happen by astronomical design to align. Pasqua proposes there should be agreement that the universal celebrations planned for next year should continue every year thereafter.

Pope Francis spoke encouragingly to them in support of their initiative, noting he has been asked several times to seek a solution to the issue of multiple dates for Easter.

"I encourage those who are committed to this journey to persevere and to make every effort in the search for a shared agreement, avoiding anything that may instead lead to further divisions among our brothers and sisters."

Christians should reflect, plan and walk together so that we may bear witness to Christ and that the world may believe, he said.

What's in a date?

Next year will mark both the Holy Year for the Catholic Church and celebrations of the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea.

That Council gave birth to the Nicene Creed, affirmed the full divinity of Christ and set a formula for determining the date of Easter. It was to be the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox.

These days though, we measure time differently from the way we did in 300 AD. The calendar a church uses determines when they'll be celebrating Easter.

Orthodox churches use the Julian calendar which was in use during the Council of Nicaea.

Mainstream Christian churches use the Gregorian calendar, introduced in 1582 as a more accurate means of keeping time.

Source

• Vatican News
• Catholic Weekly

There is once again renewed hope that ongoing ecumenical dialogue between the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Constantinople and the Roman Catholic Church will resolve an ancient rift.

That rift between the two halves of Christianity is over when Easter is celebrated.

Striving for unity

A decision by the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, Bartholomew I, (with, one must imagine, the support of the Patriarchate of Alexandria and the Church of Greece) to adopt the Western Gregorian calendar could spell the end of division.

If so, Sunday (May 5) might be the last time that some Eastern Christians celebrate Easter on a different date than Westerners.

If such a decision is made, it will be one of the most significant moves in healing the nearly 1,000-year-old rift between the two ancient churches.

It will move the "Greek churches" further away from their Slavic Orthodox Christian brothers and closer to Rome.

It will also most likely further the deep, growing divide between the Patriarchate of Constantinople and the Patriarchate of Moscow.

Either way, it will be yet another turning point in the centuries-old battle over "the calendar," and the decision will not be merely practical or theological but will be the next chapter in the longest-running culture war in the West.

The Julian calendar

The culture war began in the early Middle Ages, by which time scholars were aware that the Julian calendar, the calendar that Christendom had inherited from the Roman Empire, had some problems.

Adding a day every 128 years, the Julian calendar didn't keep Easter, the important Christian feast that is calculated according to the spring equinox, from slipping down the calendar year, out of sync with the seasons.

The ordering of time became a fight about the ecclesiastical implications of scientific discovery and societal change, the role of geopolitics in shaping religious identity and the shifting borders of tradition and innovation.

It's why, over the centuries, figures no less famous than the Venerable Bede and Dante weighed in: Time is a theological problem as much as a scientific one.

Divisions grow

In 1326, the Byzantine astronomer and theologian Nicephorus Gregoras proposed a reform that would remedy the problem, but Andronikos II Palaiologos, the embattled Byzantine emperor, rejected the proposal.

The Schism of 1054, "the Great Schism," had already split Roman Christianity from Byzantine Christianity.

Then, less than 100 years before Nicephorus put his reforms forward, Western crusaders had sacked Constantinople.

If one part of the divided Christendom accepted changes to the calendar and another part did not, Andronikos feared, repair would be impossible.

Over the next two centuries, repair eluded the churches anyway.

Constantinople fell to the Ottomans. An attempted reunion of the two churches at the Council of Florence had failed.

In addition, a pesky German friar name Martin Luther had launched the Protestant Reformation, dividing Christianity into many more parts than two.

Resisting authority

By the time Pope Gregory XIII decreed changes to the calendar in 1582, in a papal bull titled "Among the Most Serious Matters," plenty of people had long since stopped taking orders from the bishop of Rome.

While Catholic countries adopted the Gregorian calendar, and even Elizabeth I's privy council initially looked favorably on its changes, her Anglican bishops, like many Protestant leaders, saw the reform as an attempt to restore papal authority over them.

Only in the 18th century, as Europe's religious wars began to subside, did Protestant countries make the change.

In the Orthodox world, the situation was even more complicated.

As the centuries wore on, a stubborn adherence to tradition and a belief in an "unchanging church" became hallmarks of an identity that was increasingly dominated by a sense of siege by Western Christians and Islam.

The Julian calendar was not just the calendar, but part of the unbroken legacy of the ancient world from which Orthodoxy claimed its legitimacy.

An uneasy compromise

In the early 20th century, as the Ottoman Empire collapsed and Imperial Russia gave way to communist revolution, many civil governments in emerging majority-Orthodox states adopted the Gregorian calendar.

The ecclesiastical authorities refused to yield, however

The first crack in the church's united front came in May 1923, when the Council of Constantinople, convened by Greek Orthodox Patriarch Meletius Metaxakis, adopted the Revised Julian calendar.

This was a compromise devised by a Serbian scientist who said it was more accurate than either the original Julian or the Gregorian calendars.

Its primary benefit, however, was that it lined up with the Gregorian calendar until February of 2800, all without any of the complications of seeming to obey the pope.

Many Orthodox churches, including the Russian Orthodox Church, rejected the move.

Worse, in churches that made the change to the revised calendar, conservative or anti-Western factions broke away from the Mother Church of Constantinople over what they saw as a grave heresy.

A compromise was eventually struck, stipulating that the date of Easter would continue to be set according to the "Old Calendar" for all Orthodox Christians, regardless of which calendar they used for other purposes.

This remains the status of Easter today everywhere in the Orthodox world, except for the Orthodox Church of Finland, which has adopted the Gregorian Easter.

Any shift away from this uneasy settlement will likely be seen a move toward Western modernity.

Virtually absent from the conversation are the practical concerns of having a calendar that accurately describes observable astronomical facts.

Of course, this is true of most culture war issues, which by definition require us to abandon reason in favor of taking a a position on who we are and who we are not. If a battle over calendars strikes us absurd, we might have something to learn from this unfinished business.

• First published in Religion News Service.
• Katherine Kelaidis, a research associate at the Institute of Orthodox Christian Studies in Cambridge, England, is the author of "Holy Russia? Holy War?" and the forthcoming "The Fourth Reformation."

It means the Church will celebrate Christmas on Dec 25 instead of Jan 7. Other holidays with a fixed date will also be moved, while the change will not apply to Easter as its date fluctuates.

According to the Church, despite the Synod's May 24 decision, parishes and monasteries can continue using the old calendar.

The Church's local council is yet to approve the transition on July 27, 2023. However, the Church's Head, Metropolitan Epiphanius and some other bishops told BBC Ukraine the move was decided upon and would happen as planned.

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While the concept of the leap year has been around since ancient times - the ancient Jewish calendar added a leap month every 19 years for example - the current calendar year has its origins in the Catholic Church. Read more

Differences in Easter dates are based on differences between the Julian calendar, which eastern churches follow, and the Gregorian calendar of western churches.

Finding one Easter date for both western and eastern churches is said to be an urgent matter.

This is particularly so in Christian communities in North Africa and the Middle East, where Easter is observed on different dates.

In 2014, the western and eastern Easter dates fell on the same day, April 20.

The next time the dates coincide will be in 2017 and then in 2034.

A representative of the Coptic Church has been invited to the next assembly of the synod of bishops, in October.

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