The Easter Date

Details: 25 February 2011

Controversial

The late date (April 24th) for the celebration of the Solemnity of the Lord’s Resurrection this year (the second latest day that Easter could be) lends itself to some interesting history and facts about the dating of the most important and greatest of all the feasts of the liturgical year. As Blessed John Henry Newman observed, "Easter is for Christians down the centuries the Queen of all Festivals". However, from the earliest days of the Church there were controversies and disputes about when to celebrate Easter, precisely because its celebration was considered so very important. The question was more or less definitely resolved, however, by the First Ecumenical Council of the Catholic Church, the Council of Nicea, which took place in 325 A.D and which decreed that Easter should be celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. Although this is what has been generally observed in the Church since that time, there had been and continue to be discussions and even disagreements about this issue even up to the present time.

When the Eastern Orthodox (after centuries of on-and-off schisms) finally separated themselves from the Catholic Church in 1054 A.D., one of the many pretended causes (although a very minor one) was a dispute about the date of Easter. The Orthodox added another "after" to the decree of Nicea (the first Sunday after the first full moon of springtime - after the Jewish Passover). This is why usually (but this year 2011 is one of the exceptions) the Eastern Orthodox Easter is celebrated on a different Sunday than that of the Catholic Church. Many Protestants still follow the Catholic calculation for the celebration of Easter, but there are some Protestant denominations (Christian Science, Jehovah Witness, Salvation Army, etc.) which do not celebrate Easter at all.

Vatican Two

The twenty-first Ecumenical Council of the Catholic Church, the Second Vatican Council (from October of 1961 to December of 1965), also discussed and to some extent debated the issue of the possibility of changing the appropriate date for the celebration of Easter. The Council Fathers, with the approval of Pope Paul VI, who was the Supreme Pontiff at the time, added what they called "an appendix" to their Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy (entitled "Sacrosanctum Concilium"), dealing with a fixed Sunday for Easter and with the possibility of a fixed and perpetual civil calendar for human society. What the Second Vatican Council said in its "Appendix Declaration" about these matters was obviously influenced by the "ecumenical euphoria" of those conciliar days.

The document says: "The most sacred Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican recognizes the importance of the wishes expressed by many concerning the assignment of the Feast of Easter to a fixed Sunday and concerning an unchanging calendar. Having carefully considered the effects which could result from the introduction of new calendar, the most sacred Council declares as follows: 1. It would not object if the Feast of Easter were assigned to a particular Sunday of the Gregorian Calendar, provided that those whom it may concern give their consent, especially the brethren who are not in communion with the Apostolic See. 2. The most sacred Council likewise declares it does not oppose efforts designed to introduce a perpetual calendar into civil society. But, among the various systems which are being devised for establishing a perpetual calendar and introducing it into civil life, the Church has no objection only in the case of those systems which would retain and safeguard a seven-day week including Sunday, without the introduction of any days outside the week. In other words, the sequence of seven-day weeks should remain unbroken. Only the weightiest of reasons, acknowledged as such by the Apostolic See, would make the contrary acceptable."

Of course, nothing so far has come from this "Appendix Declaration", and it does not look too promising for the immediate future. Nowadays most of the Eastern Orthodox even refuse to use or accept our present Gregorian Calendar (because it was introduced by Pope Gregory XIII), but they still use the old defective Julian Calendar (which was invented by Julius Caesar). Also, since the Orthodox Churches are quite independent of each other and "autocephalous", it is difficult to see how they could come to an agreement about such matters until or unless they were to hold some kind of "Pan-Orthodox Synod", which might be possible, but not very likely. Since there are more than 30,000 known Protestant sects and denominations in the world today, coming to an agreement about Easter with all or most of them seems even more utopian and close to completely impossible.

Lunar and Solar

Until the Council of Nicea, there were two major conflicts in the celebration of Easter. In the eastern part of the Church there was a strong emphasis on the Jewish Passover, and, therefore, the usual observance of the Christian Easter was on the first month of the Hebrew lunar calendar, the 14th of the month of Nisan, the date of the Passover. In Rome and the west on the other hand there was an emphasis on Sunday as the day of the Resurrection and "this was the determining factor". Pope Benedict XVI noted that through the ruling of the Council of Nicea "the solar and lunar calendars were interconnected and the two great cosmic forms of ordering time were linked to each other in association with the history of Israel and the life of Jesus."

Another aspect of the Easter date disputes, emphasized by Pope Leo the Great in the 5th century, was the theory that the first month of the year, when Easter should be celebrated in accordance with the Jewish Passover celebration, had to do most of all with the first part of the stellar zodiac, that is, the sign of Aries, which is the ram or the lamb. Pope Leo said the Jewish Passover was put deliberately into that sign of the zodiac because of the lamb and its sacrifice and its blood that enabled the Hebrews to escape their Egyptian enslavement, and thus "that constellation in the heavens seemed to speak, in advance and for all time, of the Lamb of God Who takes away the sins of the world (John 1:29), the One Who sums up in Himself all the sacrifices of the innocent and gives them their meaning."

"Also the mysterious story of the ram caught in the thicket and taking the place of Isaac as the sacrifice decreed by God Himself (Genesis 22:13-14) is now seen as the pre-history of Christ. The fork of the tree in which the ram was hanging is seen as a replica of the sign of Aries, which in turn was the celestial foreshadowing of the crucified Christ. These cosmic images enabled Christians to see, in an unprecedented way, the world embracing meaning of Christ and so to understand the grandeur of the hope inscribed in Christian faith." Pope Benedict then observes, "It seems clear to me that we have to recapture this cosmic vision if we want once again to understand and live Christianity in its full breadth."