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The Long Way to a Common Easter Date a Catholic and Ecumenical Perspective

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The Long Way to a Common Easter Date a Catholic and Ecumenical Perspective Journal of Eastern Christian Studies 63(3-4), 353-376. doi: 10.2143/JECS.63.3.2149626 © 2011 by Journal of Eastern Christian Studies. All rights reserved. THE LONG WAY TO A COMMON EASTER DATE A CATHOLIC AND ECUMENICAL PERSPECTIVE BERT GROEN* 1. INTRODUCTION ‘The feast of feasts, the new drink, the famous and holy day…’ With these words and in other poetic language, St. John of Damascus (ca. 650 - before 754) extols Easter in the paschal canon attributed to him.1 The liturgical calendars of both Eastern and Western Christianity commemorate this noted Eastern theologian on December 4. Of course, not only on Easter, but in any celebration of the Eucharist, the paschal mystery is being commemo- rated. The Eucharist is the nucleus of Christian worship. Preferably on the Lord’s Day, the first day of the week, Christians assemble to hear and expe- rience the biblical words of liberation and reconciliation, to partake of the bread and cup of life which have been transformed by the Holy Spirit, to celebrate the body of Christ and to become this body themselves. Hearing and doing the word of God, ritually sharing His gifts and becoming a faith- ful Eucharistic community make the Church spiritually grow. Yet, it is the Easter festival, the feast of the crucified and resurrected Christ par excellence, in which all of this is densely and intensely celebrated. The first Christians were Jews who believed that in Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah had come. Initially, they celebrated the festivals of the Jewish calendar, * Bert Groen is professor of liturgical studies and sacramental theology at the University of Graz, Austria. In that university he also holds the UNESCO-chair of intercultural and interreligious dialogue in South-Eastern Europe. The present article is an annotated and updated version of a talk given at an international ecumenical conference in Amsterdam on December 6, 2010, organized by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Haarlem-Amsterdam. I wish to thank Steven Hawkes-Teeples, S.J. (Rome) for his careful revision of my text and for several valuable comments on its contents. I also am grateful to Peter Ebenbauer (Graz) for sharing several insights on calendar issues with me. 1 Pentêkostarion charmosunon (Athens, 31984), pp. 2-5. 995073_JECS_2011_3-4_04_Groen.indd5073_JECS_2011_3-4_04_Groen.indd 335353 227/02/127/02/12 113:143:14 354 BERT GROEN including Pesach/Passover. First traces of a separate Easter festival may be discerned in the New Testament period, but it is only during the second and third centuries that a fuller form of such a specific feast developed. There were, however, different dates and ways of celebration, as well as theological views on the annual commemoration of Christ’s passion, death and resurrection. Christians in Minor Asia, for instance, emphasized fasting and held on to the 14/15 of Nisan, for which reason they are called ‘Quartodecimans’. Christians elsewhere accentuated the Sunday as main feast day of the paschal event, and any fasting had to precede and stop on that Sunday. Finally, the participants in the First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea in 325 agreed to celebrate the pas- chal feast on the first Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox. However, the council fathers did not pass a proper decree on this matter.2 Alexandria was the centre for the calculation of the Easter dates. Yet, also after the Nicaea council, some differences in calculating the Easter date remained. Instead of following Alexandria, Rome often stood by its own reck- oning system.3 2. JULIAN, GREGORIAN, AND MELETIAN CALENDARS After in 46/45 BCE C. Julius Caesar had revised the Roman system of time calculation, in the course of time, the Julian calendar named after him dis- played some minor inaccuracies. Because these increasingly became major inaccuracies, in the late sixteenth century (1582), Pope Gregory XIII intro- duced a reformed and more accurate calendar. In that so-called ‘Gregorian calendar’ the dates were realigned so that the equinox would fall on the 20th or 21st of March each year, as in the time of Nicaea I. This revised calendar soon was accepted in the Catholic Hapsburg realm and subsequently – after some resistance to this ‘papal’ regulation – gradually in other parts of the 2 Conciliorum Oecumenicorum Generaliumque Decreta: Editio critica, I: The Oecumenical Councils: From Nicaea I to Nicaea II (325–787), eds. G. Alberigo et al., Corpus Chris- tianorum: Conciliorum Oecumenicorum Generaliumque Decreta, 1 (Turnhout, 2006), p. 12; cf. pp. 33-34. 3 V. Peri, La date de la fête de Pâque: Note sur l’origine et le développement de la question pascale (Rome, 1968); G. Larentzakis, ‘Das Osterfestdatum nach dem I. ökumenischen Konzil von Nikaia (325): Die Rolle von Alexandrien und Rom’, Zeitschrift für katholische Theologie, 101 (1979), pp. 67-78. 995073_JECS_2011_3-4_04_Groen.indd5073_JECS_2011_3-4_04_Groen.indd 335454 227/02/127/02/12 113:143:14 THE LONG WAY TO A COMMON EASTER DATE 355 Western world too. Yet distinctions must be drawn. As for the Low Coun- tries, for example, several provinces, such as Zeeland and Holland, the Estates General and some southern districts, adopted the New Style calendar as early as 1582/83, whereas other provinces did so only in 1700/01. Another instance concerns the Italian cities of Pisa and Florence, which used their own calen- dars but were forced by the Grand Duke of Tuscany in 1749 to adopt the Gregorian calendar. (In both cities a new year began on the festival of the Annunciation, viz. the feast of the incarnatio domini. In Pisa it began nine months before Christmas, in Florence three months after Christmas.) An interesting exception is Crete, which from ca. 1210 to 1669 was under Vene- tian control. The Venetian civic authorities did not permit the Roman Cath- olic Church to introduce the Gregorian calendar on the island, because they wished to avoid annoyance with local Orthodoxy and, in view of the growing Ottoman threat, preferred peaceful coexistence between Italians and Greeks, Catholics and Orthodox.4 A relevant case in another part of the world is China. There, since 1912 and 1928/29 respectively, the Western Gregorian calendar was used for political events and economic structures; in 1949, the communist leadership of the People’s Republic of China adopted this calen- dar too. At the same time, the complex traditional Chinese calendar still is widely accepted and employed for social and religious festivals, such as New Year and weddings.5 As for Orthodoxy, Pope Gregory XIII negotiated with the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, Jeremiah II (1572-1595) on the calendar revi- sion. However, agreement was not achieved.6 Only much later, during the first half of the twentieth century, a new situation occurred when several Orthodox states adopted the Gregorian calendar and made their respective Orthodox Churches accept it as well. Thus the Greek state, for instance, took on the Gregorian calendar in 1923, the Orthodox Church of Greece had to follow in March 1924. Other Orthodox Churches voluntarily accepted the Gregorian, or Neo-Julian calendar: the Patriarchate of Constantinople – save 4 N. Panagiotakes, El Greco: The Cretan Years, Centre for Hellenic Studies King’s College London Publications, 13 (Farnham, 2009), p. 72. 5 I thank Niek Dubelaar (The Hague) and Barend ter Haar (Leyden) for valuable infor- mation on this issue. 6 V. Peri, Due date, un’ unica Pasqua: Le origini della moderna disparità liturgica in una trattativa ecumenica tra Roma e Costantinopoli (1582-1584) (Milan, 1967). 995073_JECS_2011_3-4_04_Groen.indd5073_JECS_2011_3-4_04_Groen.indd 335555 227/02/127/02/12 113:143:14 356 BERT GROEN Mount Athos – and the Church of Cyprus in March 1924; the Patriarchate of Romania in October 1924; and the Patriarchates of Alexandria and Anti- och in 1928.7 The Orthodox Church in Finland even adopted the entire Gregorian calendar, including the calculation of the Easter cycle, at the outset of the 1920s. In that way it could celebrate Easter on the same day as the dominant denomination of that country, the Lutheran Church. In present- day Finland one observes the joyous phenomenon that nearly all Christian denominations perform the paschal rites in the same period; an exception is the tiny Russian Orthodox community, which celebrates the Easter cycle together with the Moscow Patriarchate. Also the Orthodox Church of Amer- ica as well as several Polish and Russian parishes in the Western world adhere to the Gregorian calendar. Although the Bulgarian state already adopted the ‘New Calendar’ in the middle of the First World War, viz. in 1916, the Orthodox Church in that country refused to follow and gave up its resistance only in 1968. I surmise that this happened not only because that Church was urged to do so by the communist regime, but also because the Constantinople Patriarchate and the Orthodox Church of Greece, which tried to solve the divergences within worldwide Orthodoxy resulting from the contemporaneous use of different calendars, persuaded their Bulgarian sister to do so. Yet, a compromise was made and several popular festivals of the immovable annual cycle kept being celebrated according to the Julian calendar. Thus, the important festival of St. George, which according to the Gregorian calendar falls on April 23, remained on May 6. Currently, St. George is venerated as the patron saint of the Bulgarian army and his feast has been turned into an official holiday. Interesting too is the ‘fate’ of the beloved Bulgarian feast day of Sts. Cyril and Methodius on May 24 (according to the Julian calendar). Under the communist regime, this festival was transformed in a state holiday of ‘Slavic Literature and Bulgarian Culture’ without religious reference. According to the Gregorian calendar, the feast of Sts.
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