After my recent appointment as president of Wildwood Catholic High School, I have been trying to attend gatherings in the Wildwood area to promote our wonderful high school. I have not isolated this outreach to the Roman Catholic community. I guess my ecumenical training and experience all these years moved me to also reach out to all our Christian brothers and sisters in the area to tell them the value and strengths of our Catholic educational system. One of these visits was to a civic gathering to celebrate the Greek Independence Day last week. I ran into my old friend, Father Steven Vlahas, pastor of St. Demetrios Greek Orthodox Church here in North Wildwood. Father Steven said he would continue to promote Wildwood Catholic High School among his Greek Orthodox congregants and their families.
This encounter turned my thoughts to my friends in the Greek Orthodox community here in South Jersey. My thoughts turned to His Eminence Metropolitan Evangelos, spiritual leader of the Orthodox community, Father Emmanuel Pratsinakis, ecumenical officer for the Metropolis and a dear friend of many years, and Father George Liacopulos, whose parish Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church is in walking distance to my Dad’s house in Egg Harbor Township. This year of 2010 is a special year for Roman Catholics and Orthodox believers; we share the same date for our holiest feast day, Easter, on April 4. All the world’s Christians will celebrate Easter this year on April 4 and on April 24 in 2011, a two year East-West convergence that hasn’t occurred since 1943 and won’t happen again until 2037. In fact over the next five years we will have shared three Easters on the same date, a rare occurrence.
It was in 325 A.D. at the Council of Nicea that the discussion on setting the date of Easter first occurred in the Christian world. They were divided among one camp (the quartodecimani) who wished to celebrate the feast according to the Gospel of St. John, which situates Christ death on the afternoon of the 14th day of the Jewish month of Nisan, and the other camp who followed the other three Evangelists, who situate the event on the 15th, that is, coinciding with the Jewish feast of Passover. Both the churches of East and West celebrated Easter on the same date from 387 until 1582. Pope Gregory XII, The Great, revised the calendar in 1582 resulting in a new set of dates for Easter. The Church of the East never accepted these revisions and stayed with the older Julian calendar.
The rules for determining the date of Easter were universally set. Easter falls on the first Sunday following the first full moon that occurs on or after the day of the vernal equinox; the vernal equinox is fixed on March 21. There are some highly technical rules for determining the actual date of the full moon, but when you take all this into account the result is that Easter can never occur before March 22 or later than April 25 in the West. Orthodox churches use the old Julian calendar’s equinox and lunar cycle calculations, which accounts for the differing dates of Easter.
One of the desires of the Roman Catholic Church is for us to work with the Orthodox Church to reach a consensus on the date of Easter. What a marvelous sign of unity this would be to the world. Christ’s Resurrection is the central message and motivating force of Christianity, a common date brought about through respectful dialogue could move the reconciliation closer than is already taking place among the churches of East and West. Surely, the holiest week in the Christian calendar should be the same to further the movement toward unity and love among these Holy, Apostolic and Catholic Churches.
Lewis Patsavos, a canon law professor at the Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology says that “it’s a scandal that the most important feast of the Christian church is celebrated by two different methods of calculation; any serious theologian understands that this cannot continue indefinitely, we really need to put our heads together and start seriously considering how to update this matter.” Father Ron Roberson, ecumenical officer of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said, “It would be ideal to celebrate together as Christians, it’s a very joyful thing when it happens two years in a row and we certainly wish we could do it all the time.”
May the ancient churches of East and West come together with one voice on the same date and sing the ancient prayer of the East, “Christ is risen from the dead, by death He conquered death and to those in the graves He granted life!” A blessed Easter to all who share the Christian faith.
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