Last week Pope Francis and the Archbishop of Canterbury came up against an unlikely opponent in their attempt to fix the date of Easter – the small Yorkshire town of Whitby. The reason? The seaside town played a part in the way the date is calculated each year, hosting a synod in AD 664 at which Britain adopted the Roman tradition. Councillor Joe Plant told a local paper: “The procedure has been in place for centuries – why change it? It would be disrespectful to Whitby.”
You might think Whitby’s feelings might count less than the commitment of a Pope and an Archbishop of Canterbury. But the Whitby view – that of fidelity to tradition over the aspirations of ecumenism – is, in fact, likely to prevail.
The proposal by Archbishop Justin Welby and Pope Francis – to fix Easter to the second or third Sunday in April – is deeply radical. Easter has been a moveable feast since the ruling of the Council of Nicaea in 325, which declared it would fall on the Sunday after the first full moon following the spring equinox.
The disagreements between Western Christians and the Orthodox is not about this principle, but about which calendar to use to calculate the correct date each year – that is, the Orthodox use the older Julian calendar, introduced by Julius Caesar, and the West relies on the Gregorian calendar, adopted by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582.
Abandoning the Nicaea ruling will not go down well with the Russian Orthodox. Fr Nikolai Balashov, deputy chairman of the Moscow Patriarchate’s Department of External Church Relations, told AsiaNews last year that such a proposal would be “totally unacceptable”.
Nonetheless, the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury have firmly set out their stalls. Archbishop Welby said he hoped the change would happen in “between five and 10 years’ time” and that he would “love to see it before I retired”.
Francis, meanwhile, raised the subject at a priests’ retreat at the Basilica of St John Lateran last year. He joked that Christians might say to each other: “When did Christ rise from the dead? My Christ rose today, and yours next week.” He said this disunity was a scandal.
The pair have allies among the Orthodox, too. Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, “first among equals” of Orthodox leaders, has engaged in talks, according to Archbishop Welby, as has the Coptic leader Pope Tawadros II.
The involvement of Pope Tawadros, based in Egypt, is telling. Most Western Christians barely register the celebration of two Easters – most of us hardly know any Orthodox Christians. In the Middle East and north-east Africa, where there are large communities of Orthodox alongside other Christians, the argument to unify the Easter date is much stronger.
In fact, most Latin Rite Catholics in Jordan, the Palestinian territories and Cyprus follow the Orthodox calendar for Easter, after a ruling in 2012. For Catholics in these countries, some sort of unified date for Easter seems to make sense.
According to Fr Mark Drew, an expert in Catholic-Orthodox relations, that argument is unlikely to sway the Orthodox, however. In a blog post for CatholicHerald.co.uk, Fr Drew wrote: “I don’t want to spoil anybody’s party, but I am more than sceptical that this will occur any time soon enough to concern anybody now old enough to read this.
Neither am I convinced that it would be a good idea … The chances of the Orthodox churches agreeing among themselves to abandon their current practice can be elaborated with mathematical precision at zero for the foreseeable future… Many Western Christians fail to understand the weight and authority of tradition, nor the strength of anti-ecumenical feeling within Orthodoxy. The fact that the proposals for change come from the ‘heterodox’ West is enough to rule them out for many Orthodox.”
Is there a compromise solution? Another plan might be to find a common Easter that sticks to the principle in operation since the start of Christianity, namely, the Sunday after the first full moon following the spring equinox. This was proposed by the World Council of Christians in 1997 – however, it failed to gain momentum.
In his analysis Fr Drew highlighted another important point. “The proposal for a fixed date makes me reticent for another reason. It represents yet another example of Christians being willing to abandon their traditions for our own convenience on the one hand, and in order to placate the impatience of the secular on the other.”
He concluded: “Until we are seen to be willing to organise our life around our faith, and not the other way round, we will surely not appear sufficiently convinced of its value to be able to convince others.”
This is a fair point. When the Archbishop of Canterbury rationalises such a momentous decision by pointing to difficulties over school holidays one has to ask: what is the biggest influence here? Christian unity or relatively frivolous secular concerns? If the latter is a motivation then such a move – to borrow the Holy Father’s words – could also prove to be a scandal.
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