The Dominion. SATURDAY, MARCH 27, 1937. EASTER AND THE CALENDAR

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 154, 27 March 1937, Page 8

The Dominion. SATURDAY, MARCH 27, 1937. EASTER AND THE CALENDAR

Coupled with the celebration of the Easter festival is a giowing demand for a fixed annual date and the difficult question.c> re formmg the calendar. Easter may fall on any date between Mai ch 2 and April 25. This fluctuating date is upsetting to business, complicates the arrangement of school terms, is the despair ot timetable >' and in general is considered to be so opposed to the conyen ence of the public that organised agitation for fixing it has leceived < siderable measure of support. . fifteen Last year Easter Day fell on April 10. Iffis yeai tis iteen days earlier. In 1939 it falls on its true anniversary date April 9, thus according with the date indicated m the British Easter Act, 19-8, and the proposed simplified calendar which would fix all yearly to - days to perpetual dates. Under the British Act Easter is o fa 1 on the first Sunday after the second Saturday in April, thus eliminating the moon as a factor. It has been recognised, however, that no sing e country can solve the problem, even for itself. Confusion would oily be made worse. If the British Act were adhered to, the United States and most of the European countries would be celebi ating their Easter this week, while people in Great Britain would be waiting till April 11. This would be palpably absurd. At the last annual meeting (May, 1936) of the Association of British Chambers of Commerce the question of calendar reform was the subject of a resolution approving action at the League of Nations. Speaking to the motion, Lord Desborough referred to the great inconvenience caused to tiadc and commerce, and said that a good deal of progress had been made in the direction of a fixed Easter date. When the League of Nations Committee dealing with the question last met (in 1931), . na ions were represented, and a number of reform schemes submitted had been reduced to two. T.he Roman Catholic Church, he said, was now watching with the greatest interest the progress of the reform movement. . . , There are three aspects of the problem—business, political, anti religious. Religious sentiment has been the biggest obstacle to progress, but in recent years there has developed a less tolerant attitude, and the present Pope is believed to be sympathetically inclined to the idea of reform. Last Easter the International Fixed Calendar League expressed the hope that the Oecumenical Council at the Vatican this year would agree to the fixation of the calendar. It may be assumed that there would be no difficulty with business people, because they have been foremost in agitation; nor with the politicians once they felt convinced that the public wanted the reform. Religious opposition, it is stated, is encountered chiefly from sects wedded to the idea that the supposedly unbroken continuity of the Sabbath from Creation should be preserved. Their critics reply, in effect, that the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath., But a fixed Easter is only one part of the question. The ot-ier is the reform of the calendar itself. Given dates, it is contendec, should always fall on the same day of the week. There is Vatican precedent for calendar reform in the historic example of Pope Gregory in 1582. And it is worth noting in this connection that England did not adopt the Gregorian calendar'till two centuries later. Iwo new’ calendar systems are now contending for recognition. That advocated by the World Calendar Association has twelve months of four equa quarters, with intercalary days at the end of each regular year and the middle of each leap year. This seems to find more favour than the thirteen-month calendar because of the objection to the insertion of a new month between June and July. An opportunity for the introduction of a new twelve-mouth calendar will present itself in 1939, in which year January 1 will fall on a Sunday. As it will not recur till 1950, the hopes of the calendar reformers are fixed on 1939.