The Calendar Question: Old and New

The calendar the whole Church once used is the Julian calendar, established under Julius Caesar. Because it measures the year slightly too long, it has drifted against the seasons, and now runs thirteen days behind the civil (Gregorian) calendar used in most of the world. So a church on the old Julian calendar keeps the Nativity of Christ on its own December 25 — which arrives on January 7 by the civil reckoning — while a church that has adjusted keeps December 25 together with the West. The feast is the same; the day it lands on the wall calendar is not.

In 1923 a congress of some Orthodox churches met in Constantinople and recommended a correction: the Revised Julian calendar, devised so as to track the seasons far more accurately. For fixed feasts it agrees with the Western Gregorian calendar and will for centuries to come, though it is calculated on a different principle and is not simply the Gregorian calendar adopted wholesale. Over the following years a number of churches took it up for their fixed feasts — among them Constantinople, Greece, Romania, and others — while others, notably the Russian, Serbian, Georgian, and Jerusalem churches and the monasteries of Mount Athos, kept the old Julian calendar.

Here is the point most often misunderstood. Almost every Orthodox church, whether it keeps the new calendar or the old, still computes the date of Pascha by the ancient Julian method rooted in the rule of the First Ecumenical Council. So the churches that revised their calendar did so only for the fixed feasts — Christmas, Theophany, the feasts of the saints — and left the moveable cycle of Pascha untouched. A new-calendar parish and an old-calendar parish will therefore keep Great Lent and Easter on exactly the same days, even while their Nativity falls thirteen days apart. The lone exception is the small Orthodox Church of Finland, which alone keeps Pascha on the Western date.

This is why the calendar difference, real as it is, has not broken the communion of the Orthodox churches among themselves. A Greek and a Russian bishop keep different Christmases but the same Pascha, commune at one Chalice, and confess one faith. The Church has generally treated the calendar as a matter of good order rather than of doctrine — important, but not of the substance of salvation.

The change was not received everywhere in peace. In several countries — Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, and among the Russian diaspora — groups of clergy and faithful refused the reform, convinced that changing the Church's calendar was a betrayal of the tradition and a step toward compromise with the heterodox. These "Old Calendarists" separated from their mother churches to keep the old Julian calendar on their own, and over the decades divided further among themselves. The Old Calendarist movements endure to this day, and the separations remain a genuine grief.

The Church has not spoken with one voice about them, and this encyclopedia takes no side in the quarrel. Those who kept the old calendar within their canonical churches, those who adopted the new in obedience to their synods, and those who separated over the matter all appealed to loyalty — to the tradition, to the councils, to their bishops. What can be said without controversy is that the calendar was meant to order the Church's prayer, not to divide her; that the vast majority of Orthodox, old-calendar and new, remain in full communion; and that the wound of the divisions is something to mourn and to pray over, in the spirit of St. Paul's counsel that "one man esteemeth one day above another" and each should be "fully persuaded in his own mind" (Romans 14:5).