Of churches and calendars
01/02/14 05:15
I’m sure that the trivia buffs among my readers, should there be any trivia buffs among my readers, know that the difference between the Julian and Gregorian calendars has to do with leap year. But for those of you who don’t remember this difference. The Julian calendar assumes that a year is 365.25 days long and therefore there needs to be a leap year every four years. That basically works, except that it is off by 11 minutes. The actual earth year is 364.2425 days. So, in 1582 Pope Gregory XIII (not to be confused with Pope Gregory I, the guy they named the chant after) issued a Papal Bull changing the calendar so that there would be no leap year in centurial years (years that can be decided by 100). The problem was that people had been using the Julian calendar for a long time at that point, so that the vernal equinox had slipped backwards in the calendar to March 11. So not only did they change the leap years, which most people wouldn’t have noticed, but they also corrected the slip from all of those years by leaping forward, adding 10 calendar days to make the vernal equinox March 21. They had been adding that extra day every century for ten centuries and so had to skip 10 days to make up for the difference.
It must have been confusing that year.
But, of course it gets better. By the time Gregory XIII came around, the Great Schism was old news and the split between the Eastern and Western communions was well entrenched so the folks in the Eastern Church had no intention of following papal bulls issued from Rome. So large areas of the Christian world, most notably Russia and the Ottoman Empire, didn’t go along with the calendar changes until after the 1st World War ion 1918. Some countries stayed on the Julian calendar until 1924. The Eastern Orthodox church, of course, has not yet adopted the Gregorian calendar, which means that most years Orthodox churches celebrate Easter later than the celebration in Western churches.
OK, it really isn’t quite that simple.
The Eastern churches didn’t all adopt the Julian calendar and some adopted local or regional calendars, so they haven’t always celebrated Easter on the same day within the Eastern Church. AND, because if they made no calendar adjustments, Easter would wander around the year, as is the case with purely lunar calendars, the Orthodox Church periodically adjusts the date of the beginning of Lent to line things up again.
Of course the Gregorian calendar isn’t perfect, either for two reasons. It is accurate only to the day, not to the second and so in order for things to work out scientists who are sticklers for measuring the length of a year have to periodically adjust the calendar by adding leap seconds. We usually don’t notice those changes. And, of course the earth is gradually slowing in its rate of revolutions which means that sometime in the next billion years or so we are going to have to decrease the number of leap years and some day way out in the future the need for leap years at all will disappear.
Which isn’t the point of this blog in the first point. I just wanted to note that the Gregorian and Julian calendars happen to line up this year so that Lent and Easter are celebrated on the same days in both the Eastern and Western churches. Actually, that isn’t a very rare occurrence. It happened in 2010 and 2011 and will happen again in 2017 then take a break until 2025. In a little over two thirds of the years the Eastern churches celebrate Easter a week after the Western churches.
That means that good Greek Orthodox grandmothers in Chicago can take advantage of the after Easter sales to purchase Easter candies for their grandchildren at bargain prices most years.
The Great Schism, of course wasn’t an argument about the calendar. The calendar was just one of the practical results of the aftermath of the split in the church. I guess that I should clarify that when I refer to the Great Schism, I am referring the the 1054 split between the Eastern and Western churches, not the split within the Roman church that lasted from 1378 to 1417. Both of those splits had to do with questions of authority and who is in charge of the church an argument at which we are still quite practiced to this day, having found several other reasons to divide and split from other Christians.
At the time of the Great Schism it wasn’t just the role of the Roman pope, but also the role of the church at Constantinople, decisions about which language should be dominant. The New Testament was, after all, written in Greek. The use of Latin was viewed as a deviation from the original and argument that was repeated in different ways when individuals and congregations began to read the Bible in modern languages. There also was a convoluted argument about the source of the Holy Spirit, which I have never gotten straightened out, a disagreement about the use of leavened bread for the Eucharist (as opposed ot unleavened bread). At any rate, the arguments grew more and more heated, the Patriarch of Constantinople Michael Cerularius ordered the closure of all Latin churches in Constantinople. That was followed by the papal legate traveling to Constantinople, but it might not have really been the papal legate because the cardinals were fighting over the legates. At any rate he didn’t get what he wanted which was help from the Byzantine Emperor for help in opposing the Norman conquest of southern Italy. And bingo! Two churches. The split never healed.
And you can read the history of the split and it still doesn’t make that much sense. Which is true of the other splits that have occurred in the church since. It keeps happening. There was a somewhat dramatic split in a local Baptist congregation recently in our town. The parties to the split are passionate about their reasons and the rest of us don’t quite understand.
So arguing about the calendar seems mild in comparison to some of the other arguments we have. But I like the way things turn out this year. Let’s all celebrate the resurrection on the same day. From time to time we need to set aside our differences and celebrate the things we have in common.
It must have been confusing that year.
But, of course it gets better. By the time Gregory XIII came around, the Great Schism was old news and the split between the Eastern and Western communions was well entrenched so the folks in the Eastern Church had no intention of following papal bulls issued from Rome. So large areas of the Christian world, most notably Russia and the Ottoman Empire, didn’t go along with the calendar changes until after the 1st World War ion 1918. Some countries stayed on the Julian calendar until 1924. The Eastern Orthodox church, of course, has not yet adopted the Gregorian calendar, which means that most years Orthodox churches celebrate Easter later than the celebration in Western churches.
OK, it really isn’t quite that simple.
The Eastern churches didn’t all adopt the Julian calendar and some adopted local or regional calendars, so they haven’t always celebrated Easter on the same day within the Eastern Church. AND, because if they made no calendar adjustments, Easter would wander around the year, as is the case with purely lunar calendars, the Orthodox Church periodically adjusts the date of the beginning of Lent to line things up again.
Of course the Gregorian calendar isn’t perfect, either for two reasons. It is accurate only to the day, not to the second and so in order for things to work out scientists who are sticklers for measuring the length of a year have to periodically adjust the calendar by adding leap seconds. We usually don’t notice those changes. And, of course the earth is gradually slowing in its rate of revolutions which means that sometime in the next billion years or so we are going to have to decrease the number of leap years and some day way out in the future the need for leap years at all will disappear.
Which isn’t the point of this blog in the first point. I just wanted to note that the Gregorian and Julian calendars happen to line up this year so that Lent and Easter are celebrated on the same days in both the Eastern and Western churches. Actually, that isn’t a very rare occurrence. It happened in 2010 and 2011 and will happen again in 2017 then take a break until 2025. In a little over two thirds of the years the Eastern churches celebrate Easter a week after the Western churches.
That means that good Greek Orthodox grandmothers in Chicago can take advantage of the after Easter sales to purchase Easter candies for their grandchildren at bargain prices most years.
The Great Schism, of course wasn’t an argument about the calendar. The calendar was just one of the practical results of the aftermath of the split in the church. I guess that I should clarify that when I refer to the Great Schism, I am referring the the 1054 split between the Eastern and Western churches, not the split within the Roman church that lasted from 1378 to 1417. Both of those splits had to do with questions of authority and who is in charge of the church an argument at which we are still quite practiced to this day, having found several other reasons to divide and split from other Christians.
At the time of the Great Schism it wasn’t just the role of the Roman pope, but also the role of the church at Constantinople, decisions about which language should be dominant. The New Testament was, after all, written in Greek. The use of Latin was viewed as a deviation from the original and argument that was repeated in different ways when individuals and congregations began to read the Bible in modern languages. There also was a convoluted argument about the source of the Holy Spirit, which I have never gotten straightened out, a disagreement about the use of leavened bread for the Eucharist (as opposed ot unleavened bread). At any rate, the arguments grew more and more heated, the Patriarch of Constantinople Michael Cerularius ordered the closure of all Latin churches in Constantinople. That was followed by the papal legate traveling to Constantinople, but it might not have really been the papal legate because the cardinals were fighting over the legates. At any rate he didn’t get what he wanted which was help from the Byzantine Emperor for help in opposing the Norman conquest of southern Italy. And bingo! Two churches. The split never healed.
And you can read the history of the split and it still doesn’t make that much sense. Which is true of the other splits that have occurred in the church since. It keeps happening. There was a somewhat dramatic split in a local Baptist congregation recently in our town. The parties to the split are passionate about their reasons and the rest of us don’t quite understand.
So arguing about the calendar seems mild in comparison to some of the other arguments we have. But I like the way things turn out this year. Let’s all celebrate the resurrection on the same day. From time to time we need to set aside our differences and celebrate the things we have in common.