An Easter Problem

New Zealand Tablet, Volume L, Issue 11, 15 March 1923, Page 23

An Easter Problem

People who have been looking at the calendars for 1923 have noted (says the London Times ) that there is a full moon on Sunday, April 1, and that this date is given as Easter Day. It is laid down in the Book of Common Prayer that Easter Day is always the first Sunday after the full moon which happens upon, or next after, the twenty-first day of March, “and if the full moon happens upon a Sunday, Easter Day is the Sunday after.” With this statute in mind (says the Irish Catholic), correspondents are writing to our London contemporary to ask if Easter Day should not be observed next year on April 8 instead of on April 1. The Paschal Moon. The calendar makers, it may be said, have made no error. The moon which determines Easter and the movable feasts is not the moon of the heavens, but an ecclesiastical or Paschal moon. All the Catholic and most of the Protestant countries have adopted, continues The Times, an ecclesiastical calendar, which is lunar-solar, being regulated partly by the solar and partly by the lunar year. It is stated in the Encyclopaedia Britannicu that the Jews celebrated their Passover on the fourteenth day of the first month — that is to say, the lunar month of which the fourteenth day either falls on or next follows the day of tho vernal equinox. Most Christian bodies agreed that Easter should be celebrated on a Sunday. Others followed the example of tho Jews and adhered to the 14th of the moon, but these, as usually happened, were accounted heretics.

Nicety and Complication.

In order to terminate dissensions the Council of Nicaea in the year 325 ordained that the celebration of Easter should thenceforth always take place on the Sunday which immediately followed the full moon that happened on or next after the day of the vernal equinox. Should the 14th of the moon, which was regarded as the day of full moon, happen on a Sunday, the celebration was deferred to the Sunday following in order to avoid concurrence with the Jews and the heretics. "The observance of this rule," the Encyclopaedia comments, "renders it necessary to reconcile three periods which have no common measure — the week, the lunar month, and the solar year; and as this can only be done approximately, and within certain limits, the determination of Easter is an affair of considerable nicety and complication."

For a Fixed Easter

The year 1923, apparently, is one of those in which the complications intervene. There will be a new moon on Saturday, March 17, at 0.51 p.m. The fourteenth day follows accordingly on March 31, and the tables printed in the Book of Common Prayer give March 31 as the day of the Paschal full moon. April 1, a Sunday, is therefore to be rightly regarded according to ecclesiastical procedure as Easter Day. The fact that according to astronomical calculation the moon does not reach its Bill until 1.10 p.m. on April 1 docs not affect this determination. It is the present intention to fix the date of Easter by the Paschal full moon until the year 2200. However, the movement for having a fixed Easter has not been abandoned. Tn March next there will be at Rome a Congress of the International Chamber of Commerce, at which a resolution in favor of a fixed Easter will be proposed.