I saw a UC church-it looked a lot like a Russian Orthodox church (golden domes, ikons, etc.).
My question: do the UC’s follow the old Julian calendar (which places Orthodox Christmas about a week after the RC one?)
Or do they follow the RC in such matters?
I do not know definitively, but the reason that the Orthodox churches use the old calendar is that they don’t recognize the authority of the Pope (or at least, don’t recognize his authority over them), but the various Eastern Catholic churches do recognize the authority of the Pope. So I’d expect that they do follow the same calendar as the West.
I never understood this logic. They don’t recognize the Pope as a religious authority, fine. But the calendrical shift was astronomically sound; shouldn’t that have been the factor used for “acceptance”? Or is the old child-like mantra of, “he’s a jerk therefore his ideas can’t be any good”.
My wife’s family are Ukranian Catholics, and they celebrate Christmas and the like based on the old calender.
This leads to the odd situation wherein we must celebrate holidays like Christmas twice, because my dad’s family is Anglo.
(We also get to celebrate all the Jewish holidays, because my mom is Jewish).
The old calender seems to only be used to time liturgical events, such as holidays and the like. These are basically arbitrary anyway; it doesn’t matter whether the calender itself is astonomically sound, if all you care about is when to celebrate Christmas and Easter.
Yes, they do. A friend of mine is Ukrainian Catholic and she celebrates Christmas in January at the same time as the Ukrainian Orthodox.
Incidentally, some Orthodox churches do Christmas at the same time as non-Orthodox. I think that all of the Orthodox Churches in the Balkans (Bulgarian, Greek, Macedonian, and Serbian) celebrate Christmas on December 25 but do Easter with the rest of the Orthodox Churches. At least, I’m positive that they this is how the Bulgarian Orthodox Church operates, and it is my understanding that they got it from the Greek Orthodox because the Greeks Orthodox Church was in charge of the practice of all Christianity during Ottoman times. (The Ottomans arranged their subjects not by race or ethnicity, but by religion, letting one group picked pretty much at random be in charge of everyone in that group.)
Okay, that was a random digression. Sorry.
Here’s an article on the topic:
http://www.stnicholaschurch.ca/content_pages/ourfaith/art_faith008.FAQ.htm
Note that the article’s conclusion is that most Ukranian Catholic churches in NA use the modern calender: from my (anecdotal) experience, this is not so, or at least, not so here in Toronto. Most Ukranian Catholic churches use the old calender here for liturgical purposes.
But it was the Pope who ordered the studies on it, and then ordered the calendar changes. So if you don’t recognize the Pope, why should you pay attention to his attempt to change the calendar? Note that even closely related countries, like England under the Anglican church did not change their calendar until a few hundred years later.
This is sort of the key point. Remember that the British Empire, at that time including America, did not switch over until George Washington was in his 30s. The celebration of “Old Christmas” on January 6, practiced to this day in some rural areas in America and Britain, is a relic of the Julian calendar.
The Orthodox, dead opposed to the Pope, clung to the Julian calendar. Some still do; others have adopted the Gregorian calendar despite its origins, as more closely reflecting actual seasons.
Admit it you’re just greedy.
All of those presents !
Protestants were slow to accept the Gregorian calendar as well. Great Britain didn’t move over to it until the 1750s, hence George Washington’s original birthday was February 11, 1731 (since New Year’s Day was March 25).
While I’m willing to admit that anti-Catholic bigotry was one factor, there were practical considerations as well. For instance, do you have to pay interest on those missing days?
Russia adopted the Julian calendar in 1700, as part of Peter the Great’s reforms, but never changed to the Gregorian calendar. Hence the February Revolution occurred in March, and the October Revolution in November. Two of the first acts of the new Communist government were to a) make February 1, 1918 February 14 (newspapers used both dates for several weeks after the change), and (b) abolish 5 letters of the Russian alphabet.
Both of these reforms had been discussed before the Revolution, but implementation costs had seemed too high.
AFAIK, of that list above, at least the Serbs use the Julian calendar for their Christmas (which was January 7 this year.) Looks to me from googling that the Macedonians also use the Julian calendar.
ETA: The Bulgarian Church changed to Gregorian in 1968.
The best way to understand this is to make an analogy to The West and the Communist Block (if you’re old enough). The northern protestant countries like England and the German countries refuted the power of the Pope. The pope was a frequent “guest” of either the French or the Spanish, the dominant continental powers. Along with trying to conquer the protestant countries, they would also push the foreign, pope-dominated religion on them when they took over.
(If you recall European history, the pope was a “guest” of Spain when Henry VIII asked for an annulment of his marriage to the princess of Spain. We know how that ended. The epitome of anti-catholic feeling was the attempts by Guy Fawkes and his ilk to blow up parliament and put a catholic govenment in charge. Catolic James II was run out of Britain when he had a son who was going to likely carry on as a Catholic king. In Amsterdam you can visit a Catholic church hidden in some wealthy man’s attic; when the Dutch tossed out their Spanish overlords, they made catholicism illegal to have on display. Nothing makes a good fight more interesting than throwing ideology/religion into the mix.)
So if Kruschev said “let’s change the calendar” would the West have said “Oh, yeah, it’s logical to do that”? If some European government after a big revolution had said “let’s get rid of feet and inches and gallons, and use meters and liters instead” would the British or Americans go along with that right away?
Slight tangent – does this spill over to secular civil recordkeeping? For instance, I assume airports in Kiev, Sofia, and Athens all use the Gregorian calendar? Train schedules, government agencies, etc. … same thing?
You don’t take off from Rome on April 28th and land six (?) hours later in Lvov on May 5th (or whatever), right?
Because it was scientifically/astronomically sound. So have the findings checked by other disinterested scholars. Don’t just dismiss it because it’s from a guy from a different church.
And, now that it’s been validated, it just appears to be stubborness to ignore it today.
As Ispolkom mentions, the government/administrative change was made in 1918 to be in sync with the rest of the world.
The rest is tradition - this is when we’ve celebrated Christmas, why change? We don’t expect the Jewish religion to drop its calendar and adopt the Western popish calendar?
Just curious - did the eastern orthodox calendar eventually adopt the non-leap centuries, or are they still losing 3/4 day per century? After all, that was the logical point of the reform. Which day should be Christmas or Easter or January 1st is just icing on the cake.
(Jews (and Muslims?), IIRC, use a lunar calendar, so it’s not as big a worry to be out of sync with the sun).
As far as I know, the “old” calender is used purely for liturgical reasons today. What difference does it make from a scientific POV what day Easter is on?
Shit, I’m spreading misinformation! Thanks for the correction, pulykamell.
Oooh! This is something I actually do know about.
While Jews and Muslims do both use the lunar calendar, they’re very different. Because the lunar calendar is only 360 days, you lose five days a year unless you adjust something. The Jewish calendar, as a result, has an extra month every six years. (It always has Adar, every six years there’s also Adar Bet (Adar B, or Adar 2, maybe.) It’s like a month-long February 29.
The Muslim calendar, OTOH, doesn’t have an adjustment month, and as a result it floats backwards throughout the seasons. Ten years ago, Ramadan fell in the middle of the winter (here in the Northern Hemisphere). In just a couple years, it’ll be smack in the middle of summer, which will probably lead to all kinds of health concerns.
If you’re interested in the reasons behind the Gregorian/Julian calendar split, I recommend this book. Sadly, I cannot recall all the details anymore (except that it has to do with celebrating Easter at the most accurate time), but I did enjoy reading the book.
We put an extra month in every so often to keep our calendar in sync with the seasons. The Muslims don’t, so their holidays don’t always happen at about the same time of year the way Passover and Easter do. Eid al-Fitr is going to be on September 10 this year, but in 2015 it will be on July 19.