A leading official from the world's second-biggest church, the Russian Orthodox Church, has called on Western churches to reform their religious calendars and celebrate Easter at the same time as the Russian and other churches, thus enabling all the world's Christians to share in Christianity's most important celebration every year.
At present, Easter is usually celebrated on two different dates. In most years, most Eastern Orthodox churches, including the Russian church, celebrate Easter on a different date from most Protestant and Catholic churches. One Orthodox theologian from the United States, Thomas Fitzgerald, said in 1997 that the division among Christians over Easter was "an internal scandal … And we have to ask what sort of witness this division gives to the world at large."
Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad, who heads the Moscow Patriarchate's department of external relations, has seized on the fact that, according to both calculations, this year the date of Easter coincides on April 15, and suggests that all churches adopt the method of calculation used by the Russian church and many other, mainly Orthodox, churches, so that henceforth Easter may be celebrated by all the churches at the same time.
"Each time Christians celebrate Holy Pascha [Easter] together, a feeling of regret arises that it is not going to happen next year," Metropolitan Kirill said last week, according to Russia's Interfax news agency. "That is why the issue of Easter celebrations is one of the priorities in the dialogue among Christians.
"I am profoundly convinced that it would be right to return to the Easter celebration according to the decision of the First Ecumenical Council [of Nicaea in the year 325] as the Orthodox do," Metropolitan Kirill said. He added that Orthodox Pascha always fell after the Jewish Passover, after which Jesus was crucified, and was thus truer to the Gospels.
Interfax reported that Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz, chairman of the Conference of Roman Catholic Bishops of Russia, welcomed Metropolitan Kirill's proposal.
Conflicts between various Christian communities about the date of Easter celebrations are as old as Christianity itself and have become known to theologians as the "paschal controversies." The issue was one of the reasons for calling the First Ecumenical Council in Nicaea—on the site of present-day Iznik in Turkey.
Western churches calculate the date of Easter using the Gregorian calendar, introduced in 582 and now the standard calendar worldwide, whereas most Orthodox churches, including the Russian church, maintain the older Julian calendar to calculate the date of Easter.
The vast majority of Russian Orthodox Christians see their calendar as "the icon of time" which cannot be changed. "It is impossible to break this tradition, it will inevitably cause a schism," Metropolitan Kirill told Echo Moskvy radio last week.
Other possible methods for solving the Easter date problem are already being investigated following discussions sponsored by the Middle East Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches (WCC) which have also tried to make the most of the fact that this year's Eastern and Western celebrations coincide.
At a meeting held in Aleppo, Syria, in March 1997, representatives of the world's main Christian traditions agreed on what the WCC described as "an ingenious proposal to set a common date for Easter."
Tom Best, executive secretary of the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches, told ENI that the Aleppo proposal sought to avoid a "clash of calendars" by continuing to use the Nicene formula to determine the date of Easter, basing calculations on the best astronomical data available and taking the meridian of Jerusalem as the reference point. According to this method, Best noted, the date of Easter would always fall after the Jewish Passover, as it does with current Western reckoning.
Best said that calculating the date of Easter was "extremely complicated." He added that the differences over Easter dates were particularly acute in the Middle East where minority denominations wanted a resolution to pave the way for their "common witness to Christianity." He added that calls by some governments for Easter to be celebrated on a fixed calendar date every year had been categorically rejected by all participants at Aleppo.
Best said that another meeting on the common Easter was expected later this year.
Commenting on Metropolitan Kirill's proposal, Best said: "We well understand that it is a very sensitive issue for the Orthodox. We welcome Metropolitan Kirill's proposal as an important part of the discussion. It should be on the table. In the West there is quite a keen interest in this issue. The more we realize its effect on the life and witness of the churches, the more we are aware of the need to work together on this issue."
Viktor Malukhin, spokesman for the Moscow Patriarchate, told ENI that as yet there were no plans in Russia for joint Easter celebrations on April 15 between Orthodox and non-Orthodox churches.
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Archbishop Kondrusiewicz could not be reached for comment. Father Bogdan Severinek, an official at Moscow's Roman Catholic Apostolic Administration, was not optimistic about the possibility of joint celebrations in Russia this Easter. "Liturgically it is impossible to celebrate Easter together as long as our church is not one," he told ENI.
In South Korea, meanwhile, Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox will be celebrate Easter together.
Last year, our Christian History Corner examined why Western and Eastern Christians usually celebrate different dates for Easter.
"Toward a Common Date for Easter," also known as the Aleppo Statement, was the result of a consultation in Syria between the Middle East Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches. The groups sought to reconcile the differing methods for determining Easter. Though Orthodox and Protestant leaders have since tried to reignite the statement, it appears dead.
The controversy over Easter is no small matter. As Christian Historyissue 60, "How the Irish Were Saved" pointed out, Celtic and Roman Christians fought over the dates at the Synod of Whitby in 664.
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