A common date for Easter would be accepted by Catholics, Pope says

This year, Easter will be celebrated on the same date by the Catholic Church and most Eastern churches.

But the dates are frequently different because of the calendars used – the Gregorian in the West and the Julian in the East. This can see Easter celebrated as much as four weeks later in the East.

At a recent ecumenical evening prayer service at the Basilica of St Paul Outside the Walls in Rome, Pope Francis said “the Catholic Church is open to accepting the date that everyone wants: a date of unity”.

He asked Christians to “take a decisive step forward toward unity around a common date for Easter”.

In the 1960s, St Paul VI stated that if Eastern Christians agree on a way to determine a common date for Easter, the Catholic Church would accept this. Pope Francis has made this offer several times.

The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity this year focused on the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, which produced the Nicene Creed, and which also gave Christians a way to determine the date of Easter. The Council decided that Easter would be on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Northern Hemisphere’s spring equinox.

But the Julian calendar in use in the fourth century is not synchronous with the solar year, so March 21 drifted away from the equinox. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII reformed the calendar. He dropped 10 days and made the equinox align with March 21 again.

The theme of the 2025 Week of Prayer for Christian Unity was Jesus’ question to Martha of Bethany: “Do you believe this?”

Pope Francis reminded people who might be discouraged in work for Christian unity and ecumenical dialogue that Jesus is the Resurrection and the life, who offers people grace for the journey. “Do we believe this?” he asked.

FULL STORY

https://www.osvnews.com/catholics-will-accept-a-common-date-for-easter-in-east-west-pope-says (By Cindy Wooden/CNS)