The Sat Report: Finding a unified date for Easter
Pope Francis says "The Catholic Church is open to accepting the date that everyone wants: a date of unity"
Yesterday, at Second Vespers of the Solemnity of the Conversion of Saint Paul, celebrated in the Papal Basilica of Saint Paul Outside-the-Walls, concluding the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, Pope Francis made the following remarks on the date of the celebration of Easter:
“In this Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, we can also draw from the anniversary of the Council of Nicaea a call to persevere in the journey towards unity. This year, the celebration of Easter coincides in both the Gregorian and Julian calendars, a circumstance that proves providential as we commemorate the anniversary of the Ecumenical Council. I renew my appeal that this coincidence may serve as an appeal to all Christians to take a decisive step forward towards unity around a common date for Easter (cf. Bull Spes Non Confundit, 17). The Catholic Church is open to accepting the date that everyone wants: a date of unity.”
As the Pope mentioned, this Jubilee Holy Year also year marks the 1700th Anniversary of the First Council of Nicaea, the first Ecumenical Council of the Church, called by Emperor Constantine in order to gain consensus in the Church on fundamental matters throughout Christendom. The Council was primarily called to the settle the Arian controversy on the nature and origin of Jesus Christ, and His relationship with the Father, with the outcome being the formulation of the Nicene Creed to explicitly condemn the erroneous teaching’s of Arius:
We believe in one God, the Father almighty,
maker of all things visible and invisible;
And in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the Son of God,
begotten from the Father, only-begotten,
that is, from the substance of the Father,
God from God, light from light,
true God from true God, begotten not made,
of one substance with the Father,
through Whom all things came into being,
things in heaven and things on earth,
Who because of us men and because of our salvation came down,
and became incarnate and became man, and suffered,
and rose again on the third day, and ascended to the heavens,
and will come to judge the living and dead,
And in the Holy Spirit.
But as for those who say, There was when He was not,
and, Before being born He was not,
and that He came into existence out of nothing,
or who assert that the Son of God is of a different hypostasis or substance,
or created, or is subject to alteration or change
– these the Catholic and apostolic Church anathematizes.
Constantine himself opened the Council, with St. Hosius, Bishop of Corduba (modern day Córdoba, Spain) presiding over the deliberations. The Bishop of Rome, Pope St. Sylvester was not in attendance, but was represented by two presbyters; Victor and Vicentius. In addition to the addressing the Christological errors of Arius and his followers, and amongst other things, Nicaea also changed the way the date of Easter was calculated, separating from the Jewish Calendar.
Nicaea and Easter
Easter has always been linked to the Jewish Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread, as it was during the celebration of these that Our Lord and Saviour Jesus was crucified, died and rose from the dead. As such, prior to Nicaea, the Church, particularly in the East, used the Jewish calendar to determine the date of Passover, which occurred during the lunar month of Nisan, and Easter was celebrated on a Sunday in that month. However the Jewish calendar was not consistent and disorganised, with many in the Church stating that Jews were identifying the date of the Passover incorrectly by identifying the wrong lunar month as Nisan. At the time of Nicaea, Jews were sometimes selecting a month whose 14th day preceded the vernal equinox, when in tradition the 14th day of Nisan had never preceded the vernal equinox.
Nicaea decreed two things, uniformity among all the Churches and independence from the Jewish calendar, without detailing how the computation was to be done, declaring that those in the East, who had hitherto followed the Jewish custom, should celebrate the date of Easter on the same day as Rome and Alexandria. What Alexandria had done was to ipso facto create, for lack of a better phrase, a Christian lunar month of Nisan, the month in which the full moon (the 14th day of lunar month) occurs on or after March 21, the ecclesiastical equinox, which Easter being celebrated on the following Sunday. If the Paschal Full Moon fell on a Sunday, Easter is celebrated on the following Sunday. This means that Easter can fall on any date from March 22 to April 25.
These dates were based on the Julian calendar, the yearly calendar used at Rome at that time, until being superseded by the Gregorian calendar. The method is robust and good but has disadvantages, namely the actual vernal equinox doesn’t usually happen on March 21, more commonly occurring on March 20 (but it can fall on March 19, 20, 21), which means that Easter can occur before [most] Jews have celebrated Passover (in the intervening centuries the Jews to have made alternations to their own calendar, to better reflect the actual day that Almighty God had commanded the Passover to be commemorated in the Old Law). The other disadvantage with the way the Catholic Church currently calculates Easter is that it has no actually relation to the Full moon, instead the Paschal Full moon is based on tables, which may be out of sync with the observed full moon by as much as 2 days.
The Eastern Orthodox for their part, with the exception of the Finnish Orthodox Church, calculates Easter using the Julian calendar, which accounts for the differences between Catholics on the date of Easter. Finnish Orthodox follow the Gregorian calendar, which means that the date of Easter aligns with the Catholic Church almost all of the time, with the exception of when the Easter precedes Passover, the Finnish Orthodox celebrate Easter a week later.
Within the Eastern Orthodox communion there isn’t even a consensus on the day on the which the Nativity of Our Lord is celebrated. Most follow a revised Julian calendar, which most mirrors the Gregorian, and celebrate Christmas on December 25th (Gregorian), whilst the Russian, Serbian, and Georgian celebrate Christmas on January 7th (which is December 25th on the Old Julian Calendar). If they can’t agree on a fixed date, good luck agreeing on a movable one, and one of such religious importance.
Some possible solutions
Despite the Pope’s willingness to compromise, a unified date for Easter among all of Christendom looks unlikely. The most likely solution to succeed would be for Catholics and Eastern Orthodox to revert back to the Old Julian Calendar, and compute Easter, as it has done, with the additional caveat that it cannot fall before the Jews celebrate Passover. This is not the easiest solution to implement as it would require the Church to revert to a Calendar that is deficient in terms of counting time, and that it itself has reformed, not to mention the Liturgical complications to the Roman Calendar.
Another possible solution would be to revert to using the Jewish calendar’s way to calculate the month of Nisan, as had been pre-Nicaea, but using the reformed Jewish calendar and celebrate Easter on the Sunday following Passover. This however has interreligious implications, being that Christ is the New Covenant, that has superseded the Old Covenant given to Moses by God. This may strain Catholic-Jewish relations, but may be a way of winning over Christians determined to retain the Julian calendar.
A third way, already agreed to by most of the Eastern Orthodox who follow the revised Julian Calendar, and the majority of Protestants in 1997 in what is known as the Aleppo Easter dating method, by calculating an astronomical Easter. The following computation was agreed; Easter would be defined as the first Sunday following the first astronomical full moon following the astronomical vernal equinox, as determined from the meridian of Jerusalem. Some Orthodox remain against this proposal as a it means that once in about every five years, Easter precedes the first day of Passover. A solution to this problem would be to delay Easter by one week if that Sunday was the Jewish date of Nisan 15, the first day of Passover, as calculated according by modern Jewish methods.
This has the advantages of keeping the Gregorian calendar, aligning Easter with the true vernal equinox and linking it with the Passover and the Gospels. However this is unlikely to be agree to by the Eastern Orthodox Churches that follow the Old Julian Calendar, and even less so by the non-Chalcedon Church who also use the Old Julian Calendar.
Another issue complicating the possibility of a unified date for Easter, is that these Miaphysite Churches, like the Coptic Orthodox, have broken off ecumenical dialogue with the Catholic Church after the promulgation of Fiducia supplicans, and this remains the case despite clarifications that the Church is only blessing individuals in a homosexual couple, who present themselves together as a couple, but not the couple themselves.
The Pope for his part, does seem willing to do whatever it takes to get a unified date for Easter, and is willing to do so unilaterally, taking the decision all by himself, possibly even disregarding any potential intra-Catholic Synodal discussion, in the belief that Catholics will get in line and follow whatever he decides. There has been much debate on the internet as to why the Catholic Church must compromise and others not. This misunderstands where the dialogue on this matter is at the moment. There will compromises on all sides, the Catholic and the Orthodox, with the irony being that this by adopting, what I’m calling the ‘Aleppo plus Nisan 15’ method, we will mirror what Lutherans in Sweden and Germany did for most of the 18th and 19th Century. This is may in and off itself offend Catholics who feel that there has already been too much compromise with Protestants over the last half-century, with precious little in return, without going into all the liturgical disharmony and disorientation that this has caused.
The Pope himself hasn’t put forward his own plan for how to achieve a unified date, instead I think waiting to see what gains the most consensus among Christians, and then backing whatever that will be. ‘Aleppo plus Nisan 15’, looks the most likely at this stage, but nothing yet proposed or devised seems to be able to bridge the enormous gaps on this issue that have emerged in the 1700 years since when Nicaea and Constantine wanted a united date for Easter to be celebrated throughout the Roman Empire.
P.S. Before the Pope’s impromptu intervention, yesterday, this weeks Sat Report was meant to be a look back at the Jubilee for Communicators event that happened in Rome this past weekend. To say I was disappointed by it is an understatement. It was secular ideology dressed as religion, Christ was conspicuous by His absence. More on that next week. God bless.