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A COMMON DATE FOR EASTER IS POSSIBLE

The hope that all Christians will be able to celebrate Easter on the same day in
the future was reaffirmed by an international ecumenical seminar organized by
the Institute of Ecumenical Studies at the Ukrainian Catholic University in
Lviv, 15 May.

The problem is just about as old as the church itself: As Christianity
started to spread around the world, Christians came to differing results on when
to commemorate Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection, due to the different
reports in the four gospels on these events.

Attempts to establish a common date for Easter began with the Council of Nicaea
in the year 325. It established that the date of Easter would be the first
Sunday after the full moon following the vernal equinox. However, it did not fix
the methods to be used to calculate the timing of the full moon or the vernal
equinox.

Nowadays the Orthodox churches use the 21 March of the Julian calendar as the
date of the equinox, while the churches of the Western tradition – that is the
Protestant and Catholic churches – base their calculations on the Gregorian
calendar. The resulting gap between the two Easter dates can be as much as five
weeks.

All participants at the seminar in Lviv, which included Orthodox, Roman Catholic
and Protestant theologians from a variety of European countries, endorsed a
compromise proposed at a World Council of Churches (WCC) consultation in Aleppo,
Syria, in 1997. The proposal was to keep the Nicaea rule but calculate the
equinox and full moon using the accurate astronomical data available today,
rather than those used many years ago.

Concretely, participants at the seminar expressed the hope that the years 2010
and 2011, when the coincidence of the calendars will produce a common Easter
date, would serve as a period during which all Christians would join their
efforts “to make such coincidence not to be an exception but rather a rule” and
prepare for an Easter date based on exact astronomical reckoning and celebrated
by all Christians on 8 April 2012.

However, the seminar entitled “A common date for Easter is possible” did not
turn a blind eye to what participants considered to be “the main problem”: “not
the calculations, but the complex relations and missing of trust among different
Christian denominations because of long divisions.”

French Orthodox theologian Prof. Antoine Arjakovsky, director of the
Institute of Ecumenical Studies, pointed out: “Whilst the astronomic
reckoning of the Nicean rule comes closer to the Gregorian calendar than to the
ancient Julian one, the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches did take a step
towards the Orthodox churches in Aleppo, accepting that the date of Easter
should be established on the base of a cosmic calendar rather than by a fixed
date as had been proposed prior to the inter-Orthodox meeting in Chambésy in
1977.”

Other speakers at the ecumenical seminar were Rev. Dr Dagmar Heller,
professor at the Ecumenical Institute Bossey and executive secretary of the WCC
Faith and Order Commission, Jesuit Father Milan Zust, an official of the
Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, and Prof. Konstantin Sigov,
director of Saint Clement Centre in Kiev, Ukraine.

Further to the students of the Institute of Ecumenical Studies – a
consortium between the Ukrainian Catholic University, the National
University of Lviv and several other European universities – the seminar had
gathered representatives of the city’s major denominations: the Ukrainian
Orthodox Churches of the patriarchates of Moscow and Kiev as well as the
Autocephalous Orthodox Church in the Ukraine, the Greek and Roman Catholic
Churches, the Armenian Apostolic Church, the Baptist and the Evangelical Church.

Frequently asked questions about the date of Easter
http://www.oikoumene.org/?id=3169

Proposals from the Aleppo consultation
http://www.oikoumene.org/?id=2678

More information about the seminar (Ukrainian Catholic University website)
http://www.ecumenicalstudies.org.ua/eng/ies_activity/one.easter/

The World Council of Churches promotes Christian unity in faith, witness and
service for a just and peaceful world. An ecumenical fellowship of churches
founded in 1948, today the WCC brings together 349 Protestant, Orthodox,
Anglican and other churches representing more than 560 million Christians in
over 110 countries, and works cooperatively with the Roman Catholic Church.

The WCC general secretary is Rev. Dr Samuel Kobia, from the Methodist Church in
Kenya. Headquarters: Geneva, Switzerland.

Gheorghe Vanau