This year’s Easter falls on March 31st for the Roman Catholic Church. It is on this day that Catholics will say to each other: “Christ is Risen! Truly Risen!” These same words, but on May 5, a little over a month, the Orthodox will say to each other. Catholics and Orthodox have one thing in common: Easter is always celebrated after the spring equinox.
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Ukrainian Greek Catholics and Orthodox Christians switched to the New Julian calendar, however, they continue to celebrate Easter separately from Roman Catholics. The fact is that the calendar reform concerned only holidays, whose place is “unshakable” or “fixed”, with a “fixed date”, but there are also “floating” dates of holidays, the accounting of which depends on the date of Easter and which is also always calculated separately, Ukrinform reports.
Orthodox and Catholics celebrate Easter on different dates precisely because of the difference in the Gregorian and New Julian calendars. There are different approaches to determining the date of the equinox: Catholics are guided by the more astronomically accurate date of March 21, while the Orthodox move it by two weeks – to April 3, and this entails a delay of the holiday in the latter, sometimes by a month or a little more. For example, like in 2024.
When calculating the date of Easter, Roman Catholics used greater astronomical accuracy after the transition to the Gregorian calendar. They consider the date of the equinox to be March 21st. In addition, the Eastern Churches had a rule: Easter must necessarily be after the Jewish Passover, and the compilers of Easter tables took this factor into account. Roman Catholics after the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) (perhaps even earlier) officially refused to link the calculation of the date of Easter to the Jewish Passover.
The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, switching to a new calendar, remained to celebrate Easter with the Ukrainian Orthodox. Rome never objects to the Eastern Rite churches deciding for themselves which calendar to have. For still, within the same country, it is right to celebrate together, and if the believers must be given time to reach the new date of Easter, let it be later.
Father Andrei Dudchenko told Ukrinform:
Easter is calculated the same way: the Sunday after the spring equinox and after the full moon. We have switched to the new Julian calendar, but we do not use the new Easter calculations, which take March 21 as the equinox date. We add 13 days to the date of the equinox. If the full moon after the equinox falls on Sunday, then we wait for the next full moon. But Catholics also have a flaw. The difference between the real and calendar solstice can be up to three days.
Source: Racurs
I am David Wyatt, a professional writer and journalist for Buna Times. I specialize in the world section of news coverage, where I bring to light stories and issues that affect us globally. As a graduate of Journalism, I have always had the passion to spread knowledge through writing.