A Tale Of Two Easters Why Different Countries Celebrate On Different Days
Whether you’re religious or not, you probably know the story of Easter. What you might not know is that there are two different dates on which Easter is celebrated – depending on whether you observe Western (aka Catholic) Easter or Orthodox Easter. And although the ways of celebrating the holiday may differ across borders, the meaning of the observance is the same. So why the different dates?
Let’s Start At The Very Beginning
Nearly 1,700 years ago, in AD 325, a council of bishops met in what is now Turkey to establish a consensus on various church matters. This meeting became known as the First Council of Nicaea, and one of its chief accomplishments was standardising the observance of Easter throughout Christendom. Before this, Easter was celebrated at various times by different churches, which caused a lot of confusion. Understandably, the council wanted to get everyone on the same page.
Keeping The Story Straight
If the council wanted to keep the observance of Easter in line with the sequence of events laid out in the Bible, which they did, they also needed to ensure that Easter would always come after the Jewish Passover. After all, Jesus’ last supper, so beautifully depicted by Leonardo Da Vinci, was a Passover meal. Easter couldn’t happen before the Crucifixion, which couldn’t happen before Passover.
A Moveable Feast
Unlike Christmas which is always celebrated on 25 December (or 7 January, if you’re following the Orthodox calendar), the date on which Easter was celebrated changed every year. This was because it couldn’t happen before Passover, and the date of Passover changed every year. Thanks to the Council of Nicaea, Easter would always be observed on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the spring (or vernal) equinox. To that end, they also declared that the spring equinox will always be 21 March.
A Crack In The Egg
After Nicaea, it was smooth sailing for over 700 years, until The Great Schism of 1054 when a power struggle within the church, created by the division of the Roman empire, split the church into Western Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. While the Orthodox church held firm to the Nicaean ruling, the Catholic church decided that Easter didn’t have to fall after Passover.
Widening The Divide
In 1582, the Catholic church moved to the Gregorian calendar – so named for its introduction by Pope Gregory XIII – so that the year would line up more accurately with the solar year, and retained the nominal date of the spring equinox as 21 March. The Orthodox church remained on the Julian calendar, and took 3 April as the nominal date of the spring equinox, which means that Orthodox Easter will always be later than Catholic Easter.
Related posts: