wfn.org | WCC NEWS: A common date for Easter is possible

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World Council of Churches - News Release

Contact: +41 22 791 6153 +41 79 507 6363 media@wcc-coe.org
For immediate release - 28/05/2009 08:20:38

>A COMMON DATE FOR EASTER IS POSSIBLE

The hope that all Christians will be able to celebrate Easter on
the same day in the future was reaffirmed by an international
ecumenical seminar organized by the Institute of Ecumenical
Studies at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, 15 May.

The problem is just about as old as the church itself: As
Christianity started to spread around the world, Christians came
to differing results on when to commemorate Jesus Christ's death
and resurrection, due to the different reports in the four
gospels on these events. 

Attempts to establish a common date for Easter began with the
Council of Nicaea in the year 325. It established that the date
of Easter would be the first Sunday after the full moon following
the vernal equinox. However, it did not fix the methods to be
used to calculate the timing of the full moon or the vernal
equinox.

Nowadays the Orthodox churches use the 21 March of the Julian
calendar as the date of the equinox, while the churches of the
Western tradition – that is the Protestant and Catholic
churches – base their calculations on the Gregorian calendar.
The resulting gap between the two Easter dates can be as much as
five weeks.

All participants at the seminar in Lviv, which included
Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Protestant theologians from a
variety of European countries, endorsed a compromise proposed at
a World Council of Churches (WCC) consultation in Aleppo, Syria,
in 1997. The proposal was to keep the Nicaea rule but calculate
the equinox and full moon using the accurate astronomical data
available today, rather than those used many years ago.

Concretely, participants at the seminar expressed the hope that
the years 2010 and 2011, when the coincidence of the calendars
will produce a common Easter date, would serve as a period during
which all Christians would join their efforts "to make such
coincidence not to be an exception but rather a rule" and prepare
for an Easter date based on exact astronomical reckoning and
celebrated by all Christians on 8 April 2012.

However, the seminar entitled "A common date for Easter is
possible" did not turn a blind eye to what participants
considered to be "the main problem": "not the calculations, but
the complex relations and missing of trust among different
Christian denominations because of long divisions."

French Orthodox theologian Prof. Antoine Arjakovsky, director of
the Institute of Ecumenical Studies, pointed out: "Whilst the
astronomic reckoning of the Nicean rule comes closer to the
Gregorian calendar than to the ancient Julian one, the Roman
Catholic and Protestant churches did take a step towards the
Orthodox churches in Aleppo, accepting that the date of Easter
should be established on the base of a cosmic calendar rather
than by a fixed date as had been proposed prior to the
inter-Orthodox meeting in Chambésy in 1977."

Other speakers at the ecumenical seminar were Rev. Dr Dagmar
Heller, professor at the Ecumenical Institute Bossey and
executive secretary of the WCC Faith and Order Commission, Jesuit
Father Milan Zust, an official of the Pontifical Council for
Promoting Christian Unity, and Prof. Konstantin Sigov, director
of Saint Clement Centre in Kiev, Ukraine.

Further to the students of the Institute of Ecumenical Studies
– a consortium between the Ukrainian Catholic University,
the National University of Lviv and several other European
universities – the seminar had gathered representatives of the
city's major denominations: the Ukrainian Orthodox Churches of
the patriarchates of Moscow and Kiev as well as the Autocephalous
Orthodox Church in the Ukraine, the Greek and Roman Catholic
Churches, the Armenian Apostolic Church, the Baptist and the
Evangelical Church. 

Frequently asked questions about the date of Easter
http://www.oikoumene.org/?id=3169

>Proposals from the Aleppo consultation
>http://www.oikoumene.org/?id=2678

More information about the seminar (Ukrainian Catholic
University website)
http://www.ecumenicalstudies.org.ua/eng/ies_activity/one.easter/

Additional information:Juan Michel,+41 22 791 6153 +41 79 507
6363media@wcc-coe.org

The World Council of Churches promotes Christian unity in faith,
witness and service for a just and peaceful world. An ecumenical
fellowship of churches founded in 1948, today the WCC brings
together 349 Protestant, Orthodox, Anglican and other churches
representing more than 560 million Christians in over 110
countries, and works cooperatively with the Roman Catholic
Church. The WCC general secretary is Rev. Dr Samuel Kobia, from
the Methodist Church in Kenya. Headquarters: Geneva,
Switzerland.