The Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church earlier this year announced that as of September 1 of this past year, the Church would be adopting the Gregorian Calendar for most of its feast days, including Christmas, but not Easter. The move puts it in synch with the Ukrainian Orthodox Church which made the same switch earlier in the year, and almost all the main world religions, with the exception of the Russian Orthodox Church.
The move has met with some opposition and criticism from traditionalists who would like to keep the Julian calendar for historic cultural reasons. I personally have some mixed feelings about this change. The rational, scientific part of me applauds the move to bring church practices in line with astronomical reality, however the sentimental part of me will miss having a truly, spiritual Christmas removed from all the hype and commercialism that has come to dominate December 25.
The fact that we have competing calendars originates with our early ancestors having only a cursory understanding of the earth’s motion around our sun, as well as the moon’s orbit around our planet. Thousands of years ago, humans did have a notional understanding of the annual cycle of seasons that were behind what we call a year, but they did not have the ability to precisely measure what was happening. Most early calendars were based either on the solar year or lunar months, or some combination of both.
The Persians were one of the earliest civilizations to have a defined calendar that was based on twelve 30-day months, creating a 360-day year. When they realized that over time their calendar was going out of phase with the seasons, they periodically inserted a “leap month” to compensate. The ancient Greeks had a hybrid lunar/solar calendar with 354-day years, consisting of twelve months of alternating length of 29 or 30 days. To keep the calendar in line with the solar year of 365.242189 days, an extra month was added in the years: 3, 6, 8, 11, 14, 17, 19 of the 19-years Metonic cycle. The ancient Mayans of North America had a calendar consisting of eighteen 20-day months followed by a five-day “ulucky” adjustment period that brought the length of the year closer to the 365-day actual period.
In 45 BC, Julius Caesar established a standardized calendar to be used throughout the Roman Empire that had a 365-day year, with an additional “leap day” every fourth year to compensate for the fact that the real astronomical year is 365.2422 days long. Even this “leap day” correction didn’t exactly correspond to the actual length of time for the earth to complete a revolution around the sun, and after many centuries, it was obvious that the calendar was drifting from observed seasonal reality.
In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII established the reformed calendar that came to be called the Gregorian calendar, and which has been in use until the current day by most of the world’s population. It adjusted the schedule for inserting leap days by instituting the following rule: “Every year that is exactly divisible by four is a leap year, except for years that are exactly divisible by 100, but these centurial years are leap years if they are exactly divisible by 400. For example, the years 1700, 1800, and 1900 are not leap years, but the year 2000 is. This brought the calendar much closer to the true astronomical year. Over succeeding centuries, most of the world’s countries adopted the Gregorian calendar. One of the last countries to do so was Russia, which did not adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1918.
The names that we use for the months of the year in the English-speaking world are mostly derived from the names of Roman gods and were assigned during the time of the Roman Empire. Subsequent to the French Revolution in 1793, the French government established new names for the months based on agricultural or climactic themes: Nivôse, Pluviôse, Ventôse Germinal, Floréal, Prairial, Messidor, Thermidor, Fructidor, Vendémiaire, Brumiaire and Frimaire. The calendar was short lived and was abandoned in 1806. However, names of the months in Ukrainian follow a similar agricultural or seasonal pattern.
The current controversy over the adoption of the Gregorian calendar by Ukrainian churches has its roots in the fact that the calendar and all things associated with it have become deeply intertwined with Ukrainian traditions and historical practices, and as we know, these are difficult to get people to change.
There is no right or wrong opinion on this issue, and it is up to each of us individually to determine how we respond. The universe at large and Mother Nature really don’t care how we choose to structure our lives when it comes to time. Time will continue to flow as it always does, according to its own rules regardless of what we do.
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