Pope Francis holds his crosier in St. Peter’s Square after delivering his blessing at the conclusion of his Easter Mass at the Vatican March 31, 2024. (CNS photo/Lola Gomez) This year, the Christian churches can celebrate Easter together. But that is the exception. All efforts to find a common date have come to nothing.
Bonn (KNA): The calendar provides a steep template: this year, the churches are celebrating the 1,500th anniversary of the Council of Nicea – and thus also the establishment of the Easter date in the annual cycle that is so important for Christians. At the same time, in 2025 the Easter dates of the Western – Catholic and Protestant – churches and the Orthodox churches fall on the same date, 20 April. Reason enough, therefore, to solve an age-old calendar problem: a common Easter date for all Christian churches.
However, the churches did not take advantage of the opportunity: As early as 2022, the Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople had declared that the time was ripe for a common date to celebrate the resurrection of Christ, with a view to the anniversary of the Council. In September 2024, Pope Francis spoke out emphatically in favour of a common Easter date for all Christian churches. This would be an important sign of unity, he said.
Conflict in Orthodox churches
The date of Easter has been a bone of contention in Christianity for centuries. All popes since Paul VI (1963-1978) have therefore expressed their willingness to abandon the previous Catholic practice in favour of a common date for Easter. The World Council of Churches (WCC) has also been endeavouring to standardise the date for decades – so far without success.
A proposal drawn up at a church conference in 1997 came to nothing due to strong resistance from the Orthodox churches, which had already experienced a conflict over such issues in the 1920s that boiled over into a schism. Since the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine, it is also unlikely that the Russian Orthodox Church, which supported the war, would be interested in an ecumenical signal.
The fact that the date of Easter – unlike the date of Christmas – moves so erratically through the calendar has to do with the Jewish Passover and its dependence on the lunar calendar. Passover is celebrated every year on the 14th of Nissan, the day of the first full moon in spring – regardless of which day of the week it is. According to the Bible, Jesus was crucified immediately before the Passover, so the first Christians also orientated themselves to this date. However, they made sure that the festival was always celebrated on a Sunday.
Spring full moon as a guideline
Since the Council of Nicaea in 325, the rule of thumb has been that Easter is always celebrated in the Christian churches on the first Sunday after the spring full moon. The beginning of spring is 21 March; the earliest Easter date is therefore 22 March and the latest 25 April. A total of 35 different Easter dates are therefore possible.
The problem with this is that since the 16th century, Eastern and Western churches have followed different calendars. The Russian Orthodox and some other Orthodox churches follow the Julian calendar, which dates back to Julius Caesar. The Catholic and Protestant churches follow the Gregorian calendar, which was reformed by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582. The Pope had improved the imprecise leap day rule of the old calendar. The aim was to prevent a further drifting apart of the calendar and solar year and to better synchronise the two. The Easter dates of western and eastern churches can therefore be up to five weeks apart.
Astronomers have calculated that in the 1,500 years between 1583 and the year 3000, there were and are exactly 271 common Easter dates – 26 of them in the 20th century and 31 in the 21st century. For many Christians, such a calendar coincidence is therefore highly symbolic.
Changing time rhythms
However, calendar corrections have always been difficult to implement in history because people have to change their habits and get used to new time rhythms. This is demonstrated by the popular uprisings and unrest that followed Gregory XIII’s calendar reform in the 16th century. Initially, the Protestants also cursed Gregory’s reform as a “Trojan horse” that was intended to force the Protestant churches under papal servitude. It was not until the 18th century that the Gregorian calendar, which is still used today, became established.