It’s not every 6 years that we add another Adar. It’s in years 3, 6, 8, 11, 14, and 17 of a 19-year cycle.
I’m spreading more misinformation? Just kill me now.
(Seriously. I have a final exam in fifty minutes. I want to die.)
Is there a story for those particular numbers?
Just out of curiosity, is Ukraine the only nation where the majority of the population is Eastern Rite Catholic? I tried running through other possibilities in Eastern Europe and the Middle East in my head, and everything was either Roman Rite, Eastern or Oriental Orthodox, Muslim, or mixed.
I think it means that Jews live on an island with hatches and food drops.
I want to say Armenia, but I’m not too familiar with the details of the Armenian Church. By the way, according to Wikipedia, Ukrainian Catholicism is not the majority religion in Ukraine.
Oooooh, I have a question related to this.
When I was young, I attended what was technically named a Greek Catholic church. But everything about it is Ukrainian - mass is only held in English and Ukrainian and there’s nothing Greek about the place. However, does saying it’s ‘Greek’ just mean it goes by the Byzantine rites? Technically, looking at the church website, it’s a Byzantine Ukrainian Catholic Church. Are the Byzantine rites the same as the Eastern Rites and they just used ‘Greek’ back in the 50s and 60s?
Byzantine Rite Wikipedia article, with clear answers to all your questions and a whole lot more. Quick summary: “Greek” means “using the Byzantine Rite”, which (among other things) means “using the Liturgy of St. John Chrystostom” (usually) “and the Liturgy of St. Basil the Great” (on a wide variety of special occasions). Service is in the vernacular of the country served (there being a few cases where this was true but a language shift occurred, leaving the liturgy in a traditional liturgical language like Old Church Slavonic). For Orthodox churches other than the Greek Orthodox and almost all Eastern-Rite Catholics, “Greek” in this context does not mean the language of the service but the tradition from which the service came.
Because they already were using a formula of sorts. Now someone comes along and points out a slip in your dates. Logically, you validate their info, adjust, then continue as before. You’re just correcting an established algorithm, whether the church realizes it’s using one or not.
I don’t understand the nature of your objection.
The calender needs to be accurate in relation to the revolution of the planet around the sun for practical reasons - most basically, because it tells people stuff like when to plant crops. If you plant crops on (say) May 1 every year, you have to know that your ‘May 1’ is the same every year, so they don’t die. If “May 1” moves in relation to the seasons, it’s a problem.
Issues such as the date of religious holidays are, basically, arbitrary. All that matters is that everyone in a given community agree on the date. It doesn’t matter whether Easter is the exact same date every year.
yes, they are still losing a day. the last time a day was lost was early in the 1920’s when it went from 12 days behind to the now 13 days behind.
when you look at bio’s and russian history around the time of the last tsar they sometimes will have both dates listed and it was 12 days apart.
and yes, you could leave moscow on april 12th and arrive in sweden days earlier back then. the various royal families of europe had fun with it back when they would all visit each other.
my mum was born in 1919, her birthday was on transfiguration. it wasn’t until she got her birth certificate to file for social security that she saw it was the 18th of august, she always thought it was the 19th. and figured they had the day wrong. i told her no… when you were born that is the day transfiguration was celebrated on. when she was born it was on the 18th… but by the time she could understand a calendar and know which day was “her’s” the holy day had moved to the 19th. since she always celebrated on the holy day she just thought it was the always the 19th.
she kept trying to change it to the “right” day, no matter how many times i tried to explain the “losing a day thing”.
Don’t they lose a day when the Julian calendar has a leap year and Gregorian doesn’t? The last time that happened was 1900.
Because we now have 2 groups running the “same” algorithm with different input data. They should be using the same (and “correct”) input. One group is refusing to use the “correct” data because of its origin, not because of its accuracy.
One day is only more “correct” than another when judged against some sort of purpose.
For example, The US has its national holiday on July 4; Canada has its national holiday on July 1. One is not more “correct” than another; they are simply different, as a result of different national histories.
This is somewhat analogous to one religious group deciding that, as far as it is concerned, the birth of Christ was on January 7, as opposed to December 25. One is not “right” and the other “wrong”; different histories and customs have simply resulted in divergent traditions.
Now, if different customs etc. had resulted in adopting for secular purposes a calender that lost a few minutes each year, that would be a different matter, because having dates line up with the seasons has a certain objective reality to it. Religious holidays do not. They are purely creatures of custom and tradition. December 25 is no more “correct” or “accurate” than January 7; both are more or less abitrary, or rather, are creatures of tradition.
For example, Christmas was originally “set” to December 25 so that it would take place on the Winter solstice; in Roman times, the winter sostice was indeed on December 25 - under the Julian Calender. Under the Gregorian Calender, the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere is on December 21 or 22 - so ideally, that should be the date of Christmas, going by accuracy … but by the time the Gregorian calender was introduced, the date was already fixed. By tradition.
Given the troubles caused by questions like how many fingers you use when you cross yourself, or the insertion of the word “filoque” into the Nicean creed, squabbling over which calendar to use seems pretty much par for the course.
Actually, March 25th would be a more accurate date for the birth of Jesus (assuming he ever existed at all). Early sources clearly put his birth in the spring (actually late winter – biblical Palestine only recognized 2 seasons: winter (rainy time) and summer (hot).) The celebration date wasn’t changed to coincide with the Roman Saturnalia/solstice celebration until a couple hundred years later.
The 19-year cycle is a result of the relative lengths of the lunar month and the year, and you need 6 leap-months in that period. Those particular numbers are just a way to distribute 6 leap-months approximately uniformly in the cycle.
Back to the OP, I just asked a Ukrainian Catholic friend of mine, and he said they’re mostly on the Gregorian calendar, but that it can vary from parish to parish.