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At present, Easter is usually celebrated on two different dates. In most years, most Eastern Orthodox churches, including the Russian church, celebrate Easter on a different date from most Protestant and Catholic churches. One Orthodox theologian from the United States, Thomas Fitzgerald, said in 1997 that the division among Christians over Easter was "an internal scandal … And we have to ask what sort of witness this division gives to the world at large."

Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad, who heads the Moscow Patriarchate's department of external relations, has seized on the fact that, according to both calculations, this year the date of Easter coincides on April 15, and suggests that all churches adopt the method of calculation used by the Russian church and many other, mainly Orthodox, churches, so that henceforth Easter may be celebrated by all the churches at the same time.

"Each time Christians celebrate Holy Pascha [Easter] together, a feeling of regret arises that it is not going to happen next year," Metropolitan Kirill said last week, according to Russia's Interfax news agency. "That is why the issue of Easter celebrations is one of the priorities in the dialogue among Christians.

"I am profoundly convinced that it would be right to return to the Easter celebration according to the decision of the First Ecumenical Council [of Nicaea in the year 325] as the Orthodox do," Metropolitan Kirill said. He added that Orthodox Pascha always fell after the Jewish Passover, after which Jesus was crucified, and was thus truer to the Gospels.

Interfax reported that Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz, chairman of the Conference of Roman Catholic Bishops of Russia, welcomed Metropolitan Kirill's proposal.

Conflicts between various Christian communities about the date of Easter celebrations are as old as Christianity itself and have become known to theologians as the "paschal controversies." The issue was one of the reasons for calling the First Ecumenical Council in Nicaea—on the site of present-day Iznik in Turkey.

Western churches calculate the date of Easter using the Gregorian calendar, introduced in 582 and now the standard calendar worldwide, whereas most Orthodox churches, including the Russian church, maintain the older Julian calendar to calculate the date of Easter.

The vast majority of Russian Orthodox Christians see their calendar as "the icon of time" which cannot be changed. "It is impossible to break this tradition, it will inevitably cause a schism," Metropolitan Kirill told Echo Moskvy radio last week.

Other possible methods for solving the Easter date problem are already being investigated following discussions sponsored by the Middle East Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches (WCC) which have also tried to make the most of the fact that this year's Eastern and Western celebrations coincide.

At a meeting held in Aleppo, Syria, in March 1997, representatives of the world's main Christian traditions agreed on what the WCC described as "an ingenious proposal to set a common date for Easter."

Tom Best, executive secretary of the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches, told ENI that the Aleppo proposal sought to avoid a "clash of calendars" by continuing to use the Nicene formula to determine the date of Easter, basing calculations on the best astronomical data available and taking the meridian of Jerusalem as the reference point. According to this method, Best noted, the date of Easter would always fall after the Jewish Passover, as it does with current Western reckoning.

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April (Web-only) 2001, Vol. 45