Russian Orthodox spokesman: Common date for Easter celebration acceptable– if Orthodox calendar is Used
CatholicCulture.org – June 2015
Responding to a statement by Pope Francis that all Christians should celebrate Easter on the same date, a spokesman for the Russian Orthodox Church has said that the proposal would be welcome—as long as the Catholic Church accepts the Orthodox method of setting the date.
Archpriest Nikolai Balashov, deputy director of ecumenical affairs for the Moscow Patriarchate, said that he was waiting to hear details of the Pope’s proposal. “If the Church of Rome intends to abandon Easter according to the Gregorian calendar, introduced in the sixteenth century, and go back to the old one, used at a time when the Church of the East and West were united and used to date by the Orthodox, then this intention is welcome,” he said. But establishing a fixed date for Easter would be “totally unacceptable,” he said.
Seeing that the great majority of the Orthodox Christians follow the Julian Calendar, instead of the Papal Gregorian Calendar with the Orthodox Paschalion tacked on, it is quite evident what he is saying: if the Vatican will reckon the date of Pascha according to the formula required by the First Ecumenical Council of Nicea, when the entire Orthodox Church used the Julian Calendar, then there will be a ‘common date for the celebration of Pascha.’ If the Pope wants a fixed date- the same Sunday every year (such as ‘second week in April’) then it will be impossible for the Orthodox Church to accept the Pope’s “idea,” which is, by the way, also sought by governments and businesses.
Any other way to reckon the date of Pascha is forbidden by the Council of Nicea. Despite that, when the Phanar extended it’s jurisdiction over Finland, a questionable act canonically, to say the least, it insisted that the Orthodox Church of Finland use the Western Paschalion, in open defiance of decrees of the First Ecumenical Counncil.
If one wants to look for “falsehood,” the place to begin is the Phanar, not Russia … the Patriarchate of Constantinople exercises jurisdiction over less than 5% of the Orthodox Church, yet presumes to “rule the Barbarian lands,” that is, the so-called ‘Diaspora.’ As well, attempts to drag the Orthodox Church into yet another False Union with Rome, as it did at the Council of Florence, and for the very same reason: solely political reasons to secure its continued stay on its ‘home ground,’ as, for some reason, the Phanar thinks a new unia with Rome will ever secure its place due to some misguided idea that the West will guarantee its place there, and its safety, if the Orthodox Church unites with the Pope. Which was also the reason that the Phanar illicitly adopted the ‘new calendar’ to begin with, except that, at the time, only the British were seen as its “Saviors” from the Turks, so the idea then was to gain support of Anglicans, who, it was mistskenly thought, would pressure their government to give military aid to Greece vs. Atarurk’s Turkey. Which was wrong then, as it is now. Perhaps before condemning an Archpriest of the Russian Church as a liar, one might become at least a bit conversant with the history of the Orthodox Church …