Christians throughout the world recently celebrated the most important aspect of our faith on different Sundays. Roman Catholic and Protestant Christians celebrated Easter on April 9, and Orthodox Christians celebrated on April 16. For most of Christianity’s history, the date of Easter has been controversial, at times almost leading to a schism.
Many early Christians argued that we should celebrate Easter on the day of Passover. Early on, the Last Supper and the Resurrection were celebrated during the Jewish Pascha. This came to be known as Quartodecimanism. The ancient Church of Rome insisted that Easter should be celebrated only on a Sunday.
Because of these divergent policies and practices surrounding the date and day of celebrating Easter in the early Church, it was decided that it would be resolved at a great council meeting in the ancient city of Nicaea. At the Council of Nicaea, the Fathers agreed with fixing the date on the first Sunday following the vernal equinox, and that it must be after Passover. This formula was followed by most Christians until the year 1582, when Pope Gregory XIII introduced a new calendar, called the Gregorian calendar, which moved the date of Easter away from that which was fixed in the Julian calendar, introduced by Julius Caesar in 46 BC. The Orthodox Church, which was separated from the See of Rome for more than 500 years, stayed with the fixing of Easter based on the Julian calendar. In 1923, several Orthodox Churches moved to align our calendars closer with yet another calendar, known as the “revised Julian calendar,” aligning the dates for most feasts but not Easter.
In 2015, on the anniversary of the meeting between Pope Francis and the head of the Coptic Church, Coptic Pope Tawadros II wrote a letter to Pope Francis asking for him to consider working toward a unified date for Easter. Shortly after receiving the letter, Pope Francis was addressing a large group at the Basilica of Saint John Lateran in Rome, where he remarked, “We have to come to an agreement for a common date on Easter.”
Lucetta Scaraffia, a historian who often writes for the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, said Pope Francis offered to move forward on this challenge “as a gift of unity with the other Christian churches.” He believes that a unified date would be a great catalyst, a “reconciliation between the Christian churches and … a sort of making sense out of the calendar.” The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has said that he is presently working on this task of a common date for Easter with Roman Catholic, Orthodox and Coptic experts. He said he hopes this can be accomplished within the next five to 10 years.
The 1,700 anniversary of the Council of Nicaea will be commemorated in 2025. Most Christian leaders agree that a common date for Christians to celebrate Easter would be a wonderful sign of our desire to experience greater Christian unity. Achieving the common date will not be easy, but greater unity demands that we at least make the attempt. Have a blessed Easter season!
Father Wallace is diocesan director of Ecumenical and Inter-religious Affairs.
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