A Common Date for Easter?

Pope Francis recently mentioned the possibility of a common date of Easter:

Noting jokingly that Christians could say to one another: “When did Christ rise from the dead? My Christ rose today, and yours next week,” he said that this disunity is a scandal.

I have a hunch that any shift would have to come on the part of the West and not the East (Eastern Christian readers should feel free to disabuse me of this hunch), and I wonder if the Weeping Mary Primitive Baptist Church in Monteagle Tennessee would be willing to go along with the Papal Antichrist and and bunch of bearded foreigners. But if the Church could pull this off, it would be more than a merely symbolic victory for Christian unity, because it would involve a concrete willingness not merely to agree on principles (as most high-level ecumenical agreements do) but to change a practice that affect everyone who claims the name Christian (even C&E Catholics).

Fritz Bauerschmidt

I am a professor of Theology at Loyola University Maryland and a permanent deacon of the Archdiocese of Baltimore, assigned to the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen.

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Comments

19 responses to “A Common Date for Easter?”

  1. John Swencki

    I rather like it as it is, with its connection with Passover.

    Reply
  2. Alan Hommerding

    A large-scale and serious effort would have to be undertaken, I’d think, if what we mean by “the Church” isn’t just the Roman (and uniate) rites, but all who are baptized with water and the name of the Trinity. To think that all other Christians – not only those in Monteagle – would just hop on board might be a bit presumptuous.
    Oh yeah, and Hallmark.

    Reply
    1. Adam Tice

      @Alan Hommerding:
      I agree. Looking in from outside the Catholic and Orthodox bubbles, it is hard to see how such an agreement could hope to include other churches/denominations/ecclesial communities unless they are involved in the conversation from the start.
      But on the other hand, this seems like a relatively low-stakes way to initiate a pan-Christian conversation. Do you think anyone will ask us Mennonites when we want to celebrate Easter?

      Reply
  3. Joshua Vas

    This is, to some extent, already a reality in parts of the world where there is an Orthodox majority or large numbers of inter-ritual families. Several members of CELRA (the Middle Eastern Latin episcopal conference) opt to observe Easter on the ‘Orthodox’ date. I have heard that the same is true in Greece.

    I wonder though whether this is merely about agreeing on a unified date, or also where there will be an attempt to attach a perpetual date to Easter (i.e. a fixed Sunday in a certain calendar month).

    I have a strong suspicion that if the Catholic and Orthodox were to agree on a unified date, everyone else would jump on board. The mainline Protestant denominations certainly would, which would leave any hold-outs in a minority and in the awkward position of attempting to justify a date/calculation inherited from Rome anyway.

    Reply
    1. Sr Catherine Barker OSB

      @Joshua Vas:
      I was told, just two days ago, by a Coptic Christian here in Chester, that his Pope and ours, had agreed in principle to celebrate Easter on the same day and that he thought those Patriarchates over which his had some influence would follow! Momentous news!

      Reply
  4. Father Robert Lyons

    On the surface, I’d prefer it. It would nicely fit into our liturgical cycles to have the Sunday between X and X as Easter.

    On the other hand, I frequently find myself looking back to the Old Testament mode of calculating the Passover, and wondering if even our current mode of determining Easter isn’t flawed.

    I’d prefer to be in concert with the actual Biblical calendar on this… but folks can’t even agree on how that works. Aviv barley, equinox…

    I dunno.

    If we were going to fix a date on the solar calendar, I’d advocate for backdating and determining the date of the crucifixion, and making it the Sunday within that range. Since April 3rd seems to be the most universally quoted date, I’d suggest that Easter be the Sunday between April 2 and 8, that way it would flow well with Christmas. There would be a fixed number of Sundays after Easter, and then you would be able to arrange only have a single omitted Sunday to mess with in Ordinary Time.

    Reply
    1. Chuck Middendorf

      @Father Robert Lyons:
      And while it’s a minor concern, I’m curious what would we do with those readings from 3-4 Sundays in Ordinary Time that, as a result, we’d never ever hear again? (As it is now, we never hear the 9th or 10th Sundays in Ordinary Time.)

      Reply
      1. Richard Skirpan

        @Chuck Middendorf:
        Maybe you were just using hyperbole when you said “never hear the 9th or 10th Sundays in Ordinary Time,” but a quick scan of the table at the front of the Missal, shows the 9th Sunday in Ordinary Time occurred before Lent in 2011 and will again in 2038 (rare, I know), and there are a number of years (2013, 2016, 2018) where we will resume after Corpus Christi with the 10th Sunday in Ordinary Time (and in 2035, Easter will be so early we will resume with the 9th Sunday in Ordinary Time). I suppose the 9th Sunday in Ordinary Time would occur more often where/if Corpus Christi is celebrated on Thursday.

      2. Father Robert Lyons

        @Chuck Middendorf:
        Well, in Year B, I’d look no further than what the LCMS did when they revised their three year lectionary – slim down the Bread of Life discourse passages from 5 to 3 weeks and insert more Mark.

        For A and C, my suggestion would be to recall that there would, every few years, be an extra Sunday in the year. In those years, transfer Corpus Christi to Sunday to fill the missing Sunday, and in the years where all Sundays are taken, leave Corpus Christi on Thursday.

  5. John Mann

    April 5, 33 AD is the traditional date. April 9, 30 AD is more widely accepted among academics.

    I don’t think the Orthodox are willing to change.

    Reply
  6. Karl Liam Saur

    That would essentially require the Roman church to abandon the Gregorian calendar for setting the date of the Paschal moon, because the eastern Churches don’t have a mechanism for agreeing uniformly on modifying their calendar, Balamand notwithstanding – if you can’t bring the Russian church along, it’s kinda not worth doing, as isolating the Russian church is a terrible idea….. And the Roman church would need to bring the rest of the Western churches it prompted (on a centuries-long lag) to adopt the Gregorian calendar….

    Reply
  7. Karl Liam Saur

    And, it should be noted, the Jewish calendar itself changed in the 4th century of the Christian Era. Just as the seder we know was a post-Temple development, so too the Jewish calendar evolved after the destruction of the Temple.

    Reply
  8. Charles Jordan

    View from the pew
    Regarding:” My Christ rose today, and yours next week,” he said that this disunity is a scandal.”
    – In as much as Jesus is a Jew and we endeavour to be like him, thus we are Christians, it would make sense to observe Easter on the Sunday after the start of Passover.
    – This would avoid any semblance of one Patriarchate imposing its calendar on another.

    Reply
  9. John Swencki

    Unity need not mean uniformity. Our dates for Easter may differ, but we still affirm together that He rose.

    Reply
  10. David Mathers

    Interesting that this issue seems to be recieving some increased attention with the the Pan-Orthodox Council of 2016 on the horizon (will this council really happen?!) Could this get on the agenda?

    Also, that the Coptic Orthodox Pope of Alexandria his been proactive on this topic reminds us of all the non-Chalcedonian [Oriental] Churches (Coptic Orthodox, Syriac Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic. Malankara Orthodox, etc.) that would not automatically be party to a Catholic-[Eastern] Orthodox (i.e. in communion with Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople) agreement.

    Just thinking about these realities certainly does confront us with the scandal of our deep, ancient and real disunity, and helps us at least peer out of our RC box.

    Reply
  11. Lee Bacchi

    There are many times when Christian and Orthodox Easters do not occur near Passover. The lunar and solar calendars do not always match up as nicely as they did in 2015.

    Reply
  12. Jim McKay

    The only way to unity on this issue is to agree on an underlying principle. If all Christians agreed that Easter should be close to the Spring Equinox, a scientific method for calculating it might prevail. Methods based on the Julian calendar are already drifting away from the equinox, while the Gregorian calendar already was created to keep Easter close to the equinox. Any astronomical calculation, based on the Sun and Moon, would be closer to the Gregorian calendar and would even appear to be an adoption of the Catholic calculation.

    There are always problems. Our present Pope grew up with Easter near the Autumnal Equinox, not the spring, along with a lot of other folk in the Southern hemisphere. The idea that Easter should be near Spring, or that Christmas should be near the Winter Solstice, might not get the needed consensus. I don’t know of any other principles that all could agree on. Change might even promote even greater divergences, as some groups might choose to celebrate Easter in their own springtime, even if it is 6 months afterother celebrations.

    Reply
  13. Fr. Neil Xavier O'Donoghue

    Easter is a very difficult date to compute and has always given problems in the Church. Being from Ireland, I know that at one stage only the Irish were true to the Catholic and Orthodox Faith and the rest of the world insisted on celebrating on different days – how could anyone be so small minded to appeal to Rome and the Successor of Peter, when St. Patrick had given us the real formula for computing the date of Easter (along with the only proper form of tonsure)!!!

    While it would be nice to have the celebration of Easter on the same day, surely we should be adult enough to see it as not being such a big deal that sometimes we celebrate the same feast a few weeks apart. Ecumenism has bigger problems and personally I have often enjoyed being to sneak into the back of an Orthodox church to celebrate their Pascha with them, having presided over the RC Easter liturgies a couple of weeks earlier.

    Reply
  14. Nicholas Denysenko

    From an Orthodox Christian: Pope Francis has offered a gesture of love. Some Orthodox favor adoption of the Gregorian Paschalion, citing an Orthodox misinterpretation of Nicaea as the primary cause of the problem. The Orthodox Church in Finland observes the Western calculation (so that all Christians in the country celebrate on the same day).

    I wish the 2016 council would address issues like this one, but I would not count on it. In all likelihood, they will affirm established teachings, push for a statement on marriage, and address the problem of Orthodoxy in the West (the word ‘diaspora’ will be used). All of this will happen IF the 2016 council actually convenes.

    As an enthusiastic proponent of interfaith dialogue, one who hopes for the restoration of eucharistic communion, the calendar issue is a minor one to me. I can understand how a common date for Easter would symbolize Christian commonality. But a common date for Easter would have little impact on the big issue in Catholic-Orthodox dialogue: the Papacy. Rome would elicit a serious response from the Eastern Orthodox Church if Rome proposed the possibility of redefining the Papacy so that universal jurisdiction and infallibility were removed, which would (of course) compromise Vatican I and Vatican II.

    On the other hand, I think Eastern Orthodoxy desperately needs Rome. We need a strong chairperson for a global synod (something we lack) to re-integrate us into a more global discourse on humanity and creation. I have no doubt that Romans have been listening to us, and this proposal for Easter manifests this ‘listening’; but I don’t think we listen to Rome, and I’d like to see that change for selfish reasons.

    I pray for the deepening of communion between our churches!

    Reply

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Fritz Bauerschmidt

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