On March 31, for the first time in the past 347 years, Easter Sunday will be celebrated by all Christians during the Jewish Passover, because the Synod of the Orthodox Church, assembled at Bucharest, has decided to advance by 14 days their Easter date, bringing it to the Gregorian Calendar’s Easter Sunday, states the International Fixed Calendar League.
That decision, it says, heals the cleavage made during the Gregorian Reform in 1582, when the Orthodox Churches declined to leave out the Gregorian decreed 10 days, for the accumulation of 10 excessive Leap Days caused by Julius Caesar’s faulty reckoning of the year’s length he decreed as 365 days, when it was only 365.24 days long. The difference of a one-hundredth part of a day has since 1582 accumulated the four more days making the total of 14 days, which the Orthodox Churches are leaving out of their Calendar from Easter 1929.
This uniting fact will help the High- (Continued on Page 4)
est Authorities of the Roman Catholic Church to assemble their Oecumenical Congress, as the Orthodox Churches have done, to consider the League of Nations’ request that the date for Easter should be fixed and the Calendar simplified.
The first day of Passover this year occurs on April 25, and the last day on May 2. Eastern Sunday occurs on March 31. There is therefore no such coincidence of date as the statement of the International Fixed Calendar League reports. The fact that it is a leap year in the Jewish calendar has apparently been overlooked.
The controversy in the Orthodox Church in Roumania was over the question whether Easter may precede Passover. The majority of the priests in Bessarabia and Moldavia, and also the Metropolitans in these provinces, contended that according to tradition the Jewish Passover must always come first and Easter must follow after it. Easter ought never to occur before the middle of the Jewish month of Nisan. The observance of Easter, they claim, must always be so arranged as to observe the traditional relation with the Jewish Passover.
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