The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev Justin Welby, has proposed a fixed date for Easter Sunday.
Earlier this week, Archbishop Welby announced that Anglican leaders would join talks with other church leaders to fix the date for the first time in 2,000 years.
At the moment, Easter Sunday falls on the first Sunday following the first full moon after the vernal equinox – which marks the beginning of spring – meaning that Easter can fall on any Sunday between March 22 and April 25.
Archbishop Welby said that if an annual date was decided it was likely to be the second or third Sunday of April.
The archbishop said: “We had warned the Government that this was coming up.
I would expect [it to happen] in between five and 10 years’ time. “I wouldn’t expect it earlier than that, not least because most people have probably printed their calendars for the next five years.
“School holidays and so on are all fixed – it affects almost everything you do in the spring and summer. I would love to see it before I retire.”
He added: “Equally, I think the first attempt to do this was in the 10th century.”
Bishop Angaelos, the leader of the Coptic Orthodox Church in Britain, said it would be a powerful demonstration of Christian unity if it could be achieved.
He added: “This is very much a young conversation. We are still looking at the possibility but as for serious conversation with historical and theological perspectives that hasn’t happened yet. It is a starting point.”
Abbey finds 200-year-old pigs’ ear recipe in library
Fricassee of pigs’ feet and ears is just one of the recipes that have been found in a handwritten book in the library at Downside Abbey in Somerset.
The book, dated 1793, is part of a collection donated to the library by descendants of the owners of Begbrook House in Frenchay, near Bristol. The house was burned down in 1913, probably by suffragettes.
Dom Christopher Calascione of Downside recreated one of the recipes, the Sally Lunn bread bun, on BBC Television last week, following the guidance to pat “the tops over with a feather dipt into the yolk of an egg”. Other recipes among the 142 in the book are for turtle soup and chicken curry (just 46 years after the first known curry recipe in English was published).
The recipe book was apparently written by the Downside cook. The book was discovered during a three-year project to make the abbey’s archive of half a million items – the oldest book is 1,000 years old – accessible online. Among the rarer items in the library are Cardinal John Henry Newman’s personal copy of the Bible, early Bibles printed in English and the 14th-century Book of Hours.
Glasgow unveils clustering plan
A plan to cluster parishes in Glasgow has been unveiled this week in an effort to address a falling number of Mass-goers and priests. Resources will be shared by four or five churches under the plans. A spokesman said there would be a three-year programme to help parishes work together in these clusters.
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