Pope Francis reaffirmed the Catholic Church’s willingness to accept a proposal for a common date for celebrating Easter in the West and the East. Source: OSV News.
Noting that this year, Easter Sunday (April 20) coincides on the West’s Gregorian calendar and the East’s Julian calendar, Pope Francis said: “I renew my appeal that this coincidence may serve as an appeal to all Christians to take a decisive step forward toward unity around a common date for Easter.”
“The Catholic Church is open to accepting the date that everyone wants: a date of unity,” he said on Saturday during an ecumenical evening prayer service at Rome’s Basilica of St Paul Outside the Walls.
The service marked the end of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, which focused on this year’s celebration of the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, which gave Christians a common Creed and a formula for determining a common date for the celebration of Easter.
Before the Council of Nicaea in 325, different Christian communities celebrated Easter on different dates; the council decided that for the unity of the Christian community and its witness, Easter would be celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox.
But the Julian calendar, which is what Christians used in the fourth century, was increasingly out of sync with the actual solar year, so March 21 – generally assumed to be the date of the Northern Hemisphere’s spring equinox – gradually “drifted” away from the actual equinox.
In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII reformed the calendar, dropping 10 days and making the equinox fall on March 21 again. Most Eastern Christians did not adopt the new calendar, leading to a situation where Easter occasionally is on the same day, but Eastern Christians’ celebration can be as much as four weeks later.
Pope Francis has reaffirmed on several occasions the position officially taken by St Paul VI in the 1960s that if Eastern Christians agree on a way to determine a common date for Easter, the Catholic Church would accept it.
FULL STORY
Catholics will accept a common date for Easter in East, West, Pope says (By Cindy Wooden, OSV News)
