Easter Dates

It has often been observed that the inability of Christians to celebrate together the central mystery of their faith is nothing short of a scandal, and it diminishes the credibility of Christian witness to the Gospel in today’s world. 

 The date on which Christians celebrate Easter has long been a topic of debate, discussion and, sometimes, fights.   The dates can be very divergent; an example, in 2016  Western Churches had Easter on March 27th,  and the Eastern Orthodox celebrated it on May 1st under those dopey hats.   In fact there was a whole big thing back in the 2^nd-3^rd century over Eastern Bishops celebrating Easter on the same date as Passover (14 Nisan) using the Hebrew calendar...back and forth; the so called Quartodeciman.

Today in Western Christianity, Easter is always celebrated on the Sunday immediately following the Paschal Full Moon date of the year. Up until the Council of Nicea in 325 the Paschal Full Moon was the same as the astronomical Full Moon.   At Nicea, the Western Church decided to establish a more standardized system for determining the date of Easter.  The Paschal Full Moon is determined from historical tables, and has no actual correspondence to lunar events.

As astronomers were able to approximate the dates of all the full moons in future years, the Western Christian Church used these calculations to establish a table of Ecclesiastical Full Moon dates. These dates would determine the Holy Days on the Ecclesiastical calendar.

Though modified slightly from its original form, by 1583 A.D. the table for determining the Ecclesiastical Full Moon dates was permanently established and has been used ever since to determine the date of Easter. Thus, according to the Ecclesiastical tables, the Paschal Full Moon is the first Ecclesiastical Full Moon date after March 20 (which happened to be the vernal equinox date in 325 A.D.). So, in Western Christianity, Easter is always celebrated on the Sunday immediately following the Paschal Full Moon, based on these tables.

The Paschal Full Moon can vary as much as two days from the date of the actual full moon, with dates ranging from March 21 to April 18. As a result, Easter dates can range from March 22 through April 25 in Western Christianity. 

 In the 15^th and 16^th century, the powers that be in the Church realized the calendar used by Julius Caesar was not accurate, and tried to correct it.  This correction was important for the Church to accurately date Easter, so Pope Gregory XIII asked a monk named Dionysus Exiguous to do the astronomical corrections and develop the Gregorian calendar in 1583, which we still use today.   Turns out the Julian calendar was way off astronomically...the different countries adopted the changes at different times; Catholic countries almost immediately, Protestant ones not so fast.......  

Interestingly, in England (and her colonies in the New World...i.e. us) this change happened in 1752, the changeover involved a series of steps:

• December 31, 1750 was followed by January 1, 1750 (under the "Old Style" calendar, December was the 10th month and January the 11th)
• March 24, 1750 was followed by March 25, 1751 (March 25 was the first day of the "Old Style" year)
• December 31, 1751 was followed by January 1, 1752 (the switch from March 25 to January 1 as the first day of the year, which is where we get “April fool” from but that’s another story)
• September 2, 1752 was followed by September 14, 1752 (drop of 11 days to conform to the Gregorian calendar).   It wasn’t easy.  

Anyhoo....in the Eastern Churches they still follow the Julian calendar for these things.   This complicates the matter, due to the inaccuracy of the Julian calendar, and the 13 days that have accrued since A.D. 325. This means, in order to stay in line with the originally established (325 A.D.) vernal equinox, Orthodox Easter cannot be celebrated before April 3 (present day Gregorian calendar), which was March 21 in A.D. 325.

Additionally, in keeping with the rule established by the First Ecumenical Council of Nicea, the Eastern Orthodox Church adhered to the tradition that Easter must always fall after the Jewish Passover, since the resurrection of Christ happened after the celebration of Passover. Eventually the Orthodox Church came up with an alternative to calculating Easter based on the Gregorian calendar and Passover, and developed a 19-year cycle, as opposed to the Western Church 84-year cycle.   A nightmare all around. 

As recently as June 2015 in his address to a group of priests in Rome from around the world, Pope Francis again raised the question of the date of Easter.    In fact, he said that the Catholic Church was “ready to renounce” its method of calculation of the date of Easter in order to reach an agreement with the Orthodox Church, so that all Christian churches can celebrate Easter on the same day. In the very recent past the Vatican had hinted that it might not be too averse to setting a permanent date for Easter, not based on Full moons and such so like “the first Sunday in April” or “March 25^th” (so not necessarily a Sunday), or something similar.   So the story continues. 

With this in mind, the Vatican and the World Council of Churches sponsored a conference in Aleppo, Syria, in March 1997 to examine this question. At the end of the meeting, the conference issued an agreed statement entitled, “Towards a Common Date for Easter.”

The Aleppo document recommended that all the churches reaffirm their acceptance of the formula of the Council of Nicaea, but that the astronomical data (the vernal equinox and the full moon) be re-calculated by the most accurate possible scientific means, using the meridian of Jerusalem, the place of Christ's death and resurrection, as the basis for reckoning. The result of this re-calculation would produce a calendar different from both the eastern and western calendars as they exist today, although it would be closer to the western one. It would allow all Christians to celebrate the Resurrection together, while also being more faithful to the Council of Nicaea than any of the churches are today. The obvious advantages of this solution were spelled out in an agreed statement of the North American Orthodox-Catholic Theological Consultation in October 1998.

Nevertheless, it has become clear that the Orthodox are not able to support the proposals in the Aleppo document. The reasons for this are not primarily theological but pastoral. After World War I most of the Orthodox Churches (except Jerusalem, Russia, Serbia, and Mount Athos) adopted the Gregorian calendar for fixed feasts, but not for Easter and the movable feasts dependent on it. There was a strong reaction to this among the faithful with a more traditionalist outlook, which led to schisms and the foundation of several “Old Calendar” churches in Greece, Romania and Bulgaria that still exist today. Also, in Russia in the early years of communism the Soviet government supported a “Living Church” movement within the Orthodox Church that advocated the use of the Gregorian calendar. That group was eventually suppressed in 1946, but in the minds of many faithful there was now a connection between the Gregorian calendar and communism. These fairly recent schisms within Orthodoxy explain why the Orthodox are extremely reluctant to tamper with their traditional reckoning of the date of Easter.  

The (Anglican) Archbishop of Canterbury has been at the forefront of the “Let’s Fix the Date of Easter Once and for All,” movement. At the end of 2015 he entered into the discussion with Rome and others to do just that. The Archbishop suggests the first or second Sunday in April should be chosen as Easter every year. He is very definite about this. His opinion on the real presence in the Eucharist? Not so much......