www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life Faith & Theology Hypocrisy & the Julian Calendar

Brothers and sisters:

I remember the trouble within parishes of the OCA when the calendar issue came up during the early to mid 1970s. It is a volatile issue.

May I ask a question?

At one time my Orthodox priest-mentor told me that the Julian Calendar adjusts itself by adding one day to the calendar to adjust itself each change of century. He said that the date of Christmas fell on January 6 during his youth and that many of the older people were upset when the adjustment came at the beginning of the 20th century to move Christmas to January 7 on the civil calendar. This adjustment is not as accurate as the leap year setup in the Gregorian calendar but apparently it was meant to work.

Has anyone made this adjustment in the Orthodox world to January 8 since last year marked the beginning of the 21st century?

BOB

The curious thing is that there are parishes who follow the Julian Calendar that are more westernized than those which follow the adjusted Calendar, they have only-english liturgies, pews, kneelers.. The Calendar is not the protector of tradition and after all, the Calendar is still the same. Same fests, same Saints same unity.

Well, Bob, the Nativity still falls on 7 January, as it did in the 20th century. The growing disparity between the calendars is due the Julian having a leap every cotton-pickin fourth year, and the Gregorian having a non-leap year on the century year (xx00), except when the year is divisible by 400-then there is a leap year. Otherwise (if every century had no yeap year) there would be 17 days difference this year, not 13.

Father Mark has some very good points. And if one celebrates the Nativity of Christ on January 7th, much of the retail frenzy and commercialism which has unfortunately come to be at the center of the practice of Christmas in the US is over.

There are parish communities that stick to the Old Calendar and have minimal problems. It seems to work at St. Elias following the Julian Calendar, doesn't it Daniil?

And then there's the OCA practice of "half and half", i.e. celebrate fixed feast days on the Gregorian Calendar (such as Christmas) and observe the Paschalion on the Julian Calendar with the majority of Orthodox churches.

The Julian calendar is the Church calendar, precisely because it has been sanctified and ratified by the Orthodox Church.

The Gregorian calendar was introduced into Orthodoxy without the correct canonical procedures, by a megalomaniac free mason patriarch who was bribed by the Anglicans to make his 'ecumenical gesture.

Nobody claims the scientific accuracy of the Julian calendar - and I have to disagree with a previous post and say that the calendar and the celebration of the feasts and fasts IS a sign of unity!!!

Spasi Khristos -
Mark, monk and sinner

Dear Theophan,

Yes, it is true that in the 19th century, the Nativity was celebrated on January 6th and that a day was added during the 20th century.

The Armenians of Israel did not add that day and so continue to celebrate their Christmas Day on January 18th not the 19th (as we know, they celebrate Christmas according to the original practice of the Church, on the day of the Theophany or Baptism of Christ in the Jordan).

I am informed that there is no need yet to add another day to the New Calendar to allow the Old Calendar Christmas to fall on the 8th of January.

This apparently won't be required for another century or so.

We can come back to this issue then

Alex

Dear Alex,

I have spent the night thinking about your problem of being pulled in two directions. I can understand your position, and do feel for you.

Aside from minnor issues like time, why stay home? Why not celebrate these feasts twice! What a blessing to be able to have TWO Christmases!

There's no good answer. The Melkites have, for years, proposed using the Old Calendar world-wide. In fact, Patriarch Gregory III planned to use the Old Calendar in the Middle East. The people didn't want it, and so it wasn't used. It hasn't been used in the United States because many of our people wander back and forth between the Melkites and the Latins and the feeling was it would be too confusing if there were two different calendars. Of course, the reality is that there are two different calendars that happen to have every single month and day in perfect correspondence -- just with different saints, different readings, different season names, etc.

Perhaps, as with all things in this life, a little messy confusion is part of what we need to deal with in the process of theosis.

Edward, deacon, sinner, and very confused...

+ Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us - Amen!

Dear Friends,

Rather than experiencing some shock at Father Mark's harsh words on this subject, I think we should try to understand the background of this sensitive issue.

First of all, there seems to be a tendency here to somehow downgrade the Old Calendar as something less scientific than the New, as something that is "off" with the rest of the universe, that isn't keeping with the times etc.

In fact, astronomers to this day use the Julian Calendar for their calculations, not the Gregorian.

This was highlighted once by a professor of astronomy that became Orthodox in his later years.

He wrote that the Julian Calendar is much more "perfect" for purposes of calculations when dealing with the stars and solar galaxies than the Gregorian Calendar. For one thing, the Julian Calendar begins at "O" while the Gregorian does not.

So arguments that the defenders of the Julian Calendar are behind the times academically just don't wash.

In addition, theologians discussing this matter, whether we like ecumenism or not, have concluded that there are a number of errors in the Gregorian Calendar as well that need to be corrected.

There are many calendars used by different cultures around the world. New Year's Day is celebrated at different times, and now even the Celtic American revival is beginning to celebrate Celtic New Year's Day on November 1st. There is Tibetan New Year's, Chinese New Year's etc.

Those in some Muslim countries who wanted to mark the year 2000 were being persecuted since that was considered a deference to the "Christian calendar."

The fact that the world now follows the Gregorian calendar means . . . well, squat.

The "Common Era" and "Before the Common Era" etc. ensure that the Gregorian calendar remains a way of establishing time that is shared by the world in a religiously innocuous way.

The Julian Calendar, despite the fact that it was established during the reign of a pagan Roman Emperor (to want to reject it because of this is really laughable), is the Calendar that has been, as Fr. Mark says, liturgically sanctioned by the One, Holy, Orthodox-Catholic and Apostolic Church of Christ for the ordering of its liturgical life in Christ.

We observe it not because it is "astronomically correct" (the Gregorian Calendar is deficient in this way also).

We observe it BECAUSE it is the medium by which the Church has ordered her liturgical life of worship and adoration of God in Christ by the Holy Spirit.

The change to the Gregorian Calendar has upset, in some cases, mostly having to do with the Fast of the Apostles, the liturgical balance in this life by which means our salvation is worked out.

Pope Gregory who ordered the change was truly acting more as a secular humanist than as a theologian.

The astronomers he hired for this purpose were agnostics at best.

It was a knee-jerk reaction by the West to answer rationalist arguments by, essentially, giving in to them and adopting them for one's own.

Thus, if the Church Calendar is wrong, then you (agnostics) tell us what Calendar we should be using.

If the miracles of the Saints aren't trustworthy as we experience them, then you medical scientists use your own 'scientific' measurements and observations to determine their veracity.

And so on.

In fact, many sections of the Roman Catholic Church refused to accept Gregory's new calendar for the same reasons many Orthodox and Eastern Catholics refuse it today (the Ukrainian Catholics in Ukraine are the majority of Eastern Catholics and they all follow the Old Calendar).

The secular arm of force was used to impose this calendar in the West, opposition to it seen as effrontery to papal supremacy, right or wrong.

(Many Italian and other bishops refused to accept Pope Urban VIII's decree reserving even beatification to Rome - they continued to locally beatify their own saints until Rome, in this century, felt compelled to accept their liturgical days in its calendar, but without approving their cult).

Fr. Mark is saying nothing about Gregory that many RC bishops living in that Pope's time would not have concurred with also.

The Julian Calendar is the true Calendar of the Church because it is sanctioned for the liturgical life of the Church by the Church.

It is also unchanging. The Gregorian Calendar will have to be "updated" still, as theologians studying this issue are aware.

Observing it can prove challenging.

But to drop it because it is not scientific is to miss the entire point of its use.

Alex

Here [rocorcafe.com] are 5 arguments [rocorcafe.com] for the whole Church staying on the Julian Calendar. Personally I cannot see a valid argument that go against these five.

As for me and my family, we will going to Divine Liturgy and taking Old Calendar Nativity off.

I have to say Alex that I do not consider my words harsh.

There are disturbing, historically recorded facts surrounding the change of calendar. They cannot be denied. Patriarch Meletios, of very sorry memory, was a divisive, disreputable schemer, who occupied two patriarchal thrones and dreamt of Jerusalem as his third. He had no mandate to carry ut the calendar change and fled from Constantinople in fear of his life - such was the violent reaction of the Phanariote Greeks.

His legacy is one of division and persecution - and he represents the very worst of Orthodoxy.

May the All-Merciful Lord, have mercy upon his soul.

Spasi Khristos -
Mark, monk and sinner.

Bless me a sinner, Fr. Mark,

No, of course not!

I wasn't chiding you, Father, but only trying to explain to those who MIGHT consider your words harsh.

As I think I've shown, I agree with everything you said and tried to give some more historical background to defend your statements.

Alex

A computation of elapsed time since some calendar date in the past, or conversely, indeed requires fewer arithmetic operations if the Julian calendar is used that the Gregorian. But this "advantage" of the Julian calendar is really a triviality. Anyone who could write an algorithm for one computation could do it for the other; and the rest can just go to a website, and point & click. Or use the C-program (or Unix script) here:
http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/pub/soc.religion.christian/faq/easter-date

The Gregorian calendar does what a calendar is supposed to do very well; the new, revised Julian calendar does a little better. (The distinction between the two will not be more than a day over the next millenium.) The "old calendar" does not.

(At least very detailed site that I found, by the way, indicates that indeed the Gregorian claendar did start at "0", and points out that the consequences are that centuries properly begin in the aught year; a point of recent interest).

Can you explain this a little more fully? It is clear that the hybrid use of Gregorian for the fixed feasts and Old Calendar for the moveable feasts, leads to peculiarites in the way that they coincide. But these gross anomalies do not occur with the straight Gregorian usage. The latter, in conjunction with its adherence to a more accurate lunar cycle, does forsake the simple 19 year recurrence of earlier approximations. (In the Gregorian calendar/Paschalion the the recurrence period is considerably longer, and if the best astronomical observations were to be used there would be no periodic recurrence; nevertheless the number of distinct liturgical years - each having a particular coincidence between fixed and moveable feasts - is limited much way as the Julian calendar but with 9 more possibilities.) While the simplicity and regularity of the 19 year cycle is attractive, its dogmatic significance is unclear to me. Was this cycle ever dogmatized in the East? Maybe others can comment on this point.

Ad hominem attacks on the religious convictions of the astronomers working on the calendar problem is hardly probative. More importantly, the use of astronomical observations is not a novelty of the post-schism West. Astronomical observations were used to determine the vernal equinox both before and after the first ecumencial council. This historical fact, together with the fact that the date used at that time for the vernal equinox was not that of the original Julian calendar (March 25), rather it was the actual (within the accuracy of measurement) date of the equinox (March 21 at that time, according to the Alexandrians, March 18 according to the Romans), makes a strong case that in their decree on the calculation of the date of Easter, the council was not selecting a particular calendar date, but in fact, when using the words "vernal equinox", curiously enough meant "vernal equinox".

Interestingly, Pope Gregory could have fixed the calendar for yearly accuracy without shifting its phase. The idea was conservative one, to adhere not only to council's decree, but also to the date that it implied at the time. He shifted the phase of the calendar so that the equinox fell on March 21 (approximately) of the new calendar.

djs

Dear djs,

Somehow I feel I've offended you - judging by your auspicious, studious tone!

If I had, and however I have - forgive me a sinner!

It was not my intention to do an "ad hominem" attack on the Pope's astronomers. The fact is they were not believers nor were they members of the Catholic Church. They were so by their own admission. I'm simply calling them how they would themselves wish to be called.

As for how the Gregorian calendar offsets the fasts and some feasts of the Orthodox Old Calendar, I'll leave that to others more learned -and to whom you might feel a little less antagonism - to discuss that.

There are other arguments in favour of the Old Calendar, which the Patriarchal Ukrainian CAtholic Church follows as its official calendar, by the way.

The liturgical and church arguments are tantamount here, not scientific ones. The RC Church has tended to follow the critical, scientific and rationalist spirit of the world in these and other matters and this has not resulted in good things . . .

Nor did many RC bishops find Pope Gregory's arguments compelling, Supreme Pontiff rhetoric notwithstanding, and opposed him over the calendar issue at the time.

It is too bad the astronomy professor who discussed the Julian Calendar and why astronomers prefer it to the Gregorian isn't here any more.

I think he was asked to leave after posting an untoward image in response to what he believed was a trivial discussion over cassocks . . .

Alex

Alex,

You have the great knack for posting in a conversational tone. I have the disadvantage of writing in an auspicious and studious tone that sometimes even excites people to threaten violence!

Dear djs,

No problem, Big Guy!

I thought you were upset with me for that post yesterday with Fr. Thomas about holding you while he hit you

I was joking, of course.

Just before he'd throw the first punch, I'd let go of you

I wouldn't let a fellow Ukie be attacked by an Orthodox!

Alex