Quest for a common Easter

ACTUALLY, this entire week is a light one, as far as most people are concerned. Politicians are looking forward to this week as the last stretch of R&R they’re going to have until the elections in May. The same goes for media and the public.

I noticed unusually heavy traffic here in Metro Manila last Friday, so I assume the Holy Week holiday’s begun for many people: it’s a nice stretch of vacation time this year, since the President’s holiday economics (more thoroughly planned in recent years, because of complaints from businessmen) means the Holy Week vacation includes Bataan Day this year.

The whole holiday period of course has a religious purpose -the commemoration of Holy Week. Since not much else is going on, I thought I’d focus on some interesting things concerning Easter. This year marks one of the fairly rare occasions when the two oldest branches of Christianity, the Roman Catholic and the Easter Orthodox, will be celebrating Easter on the same date (all of Western Christianity, of course, follows the calendar and the liturgical year, followed by Catholics).

A thorough introduction to the different historical and religious calendars can be found in Calendars and their History. Jesus himself of course followed the Hebrew Calendar, and Holy Week commemorates a period that began with Jesus’ trip to Jerusalem for the Passover. But from reading up on the Hebrew calendar, it seems two things happened in the case of his followers. First, the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem (the plundering of which is commemorated by frieze on the Arch of Titus) meant the elaborate institutional means for maintaining supervision over the Hebrew Calendar was dissolved; and second, as more Gentiles became Christians, they came to mark the year according to the Roman calendar, that is, the Julian Calendar.

As for Eastern Christendom, when Rome decreed a reformed calendar in 1582, the East, which had separated from Rome centuries before, didn’t follow suit. They continued to follow the Julian Calendar. Russia, in particular, as one of the centers of Eastern Orthodoxy (it viewed itself as the “third Rome,” or the new center of Christendom, the first two being Rome itself and Constantinople), has continued to resist efforts to unite Christendom under a common calendar (when the union of Church and State was dissolved with the Russian Revolution, the Communists adopted the Gregorian Calendar, which led to historians pointing out the irony of commemorating the October Revolution, which took place under the Julian Calendar, in November, the event’s date under the Gregorian Calendar).

Easter then is based on a Jewish feast, calculated according to what was originally a lunar calendar, but fixed according to a solar, that is, the Roman, calendar, and one which has an old and a newer version in turn adopted by the two oldest branches of Christianity. The whole thing has led to a complicated set of calculations used by various Christian traditions (and even within particular traditions) to determine the date for Easter. And so, different Churches refer to different calendars -“Old” Style, “New Style” and “Revised”.

If you read about the debates among Christians on the proper date for Easter, you’ll notice the eventual supremacy of Rome (for several centuries, at least) in determining the date, which suggests something we tend to overlook.

One of the titles of the Pope is “Supreme Pontiff,” an inheritance from Ancient Rome, and it’s notable that the Pontiffs in Ancient Rome fixed the dates for official observances (and elections). Just last year, the present Pope dropped one of his titles, that of Patriarch of the West. This is apparently in the hope that dropping the title will foster reconciliation with the Eastern Orthodox (the move was received positively, but cautiously).

The Pope’s efforts at reconciling with the Eastern Churches is a major undertaking of his pontificate, but perhaps the first tangible sign for many that things are getting somewhere, would be for the two branches to finally share a common date for Easter.

For Filipino Catholics, one of the highlights of Easter is watching the Pope’s Easter Mass, and his Urbi et Orbi “to the city and to the world”) message and blessing (which carries a plenary indulgence and can be received over the airwaves, which means if you watch it on TV or listen to it over the radio, you get the Pope’s blessing as if you were in St. Peter’s square!). The Pope says “Happy Easter” in many languages, and Filipinos look forward to hearing it in Filipino.

Some websites to play with calendar dates: The US Naval Observatory’s Julian Date Converter, and Fourmilab’s Calendar Converter. Enjoy.

The Inquirer family will be on vacation Wednesday onwards, so I’ll see you next Monday. Happy Easter to all!

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