“I, Kirill, Patriarch of Moscow and all Russia, am addressing all the parties involved in the fratricidal conflict to ask them to establish a ceasefire and establish a Christmas truce from 12:00 on January 6 to 0:00 on January 7. January so that Orthodox people can attend masses on Christmas Eve and on the day of the Birth of Christ”.
With these words, the highest eminence of the Russian Church announced what would later be the firm decision that Russian President Vladimir Putin would adopt to establish a more than precarious truce in the war that he is maintaining with Ukraine, and which has highlighted the disparity of criteria when celebrating Christmas. On the website of the Church.
But why don’t Russians celebrate Christmas on December 25?
Orthodox Christmas: in January
In the 11th century, due to ritual differences but also to theological or doctrinal issues such as the concept of purgatory and the so-called “Trinitarian controversy”, there was a separation within the Catholic Church.
What is known as the “West-East schism“, which resulted in the creation of the Orthodox Church, which has about 300 million faithful and which carries out its mission in the countries of Eastern Europe, including Russia and Greece, as well as in Turkey and in countries of Africa and America .
Although they share similar rhythms, the celebrations of both churches have grown apart.
The computation of time has always brought popes, kings and thinkers to their heads, until in the 16th century (1582) just 440 years ago, the latter conceived from the School of Salamanca a system with which we now measure the passage of days. : the Gregorian calendar.
Thus, the old Julian calendar -in honor of Julius Caesar- was abandoned to embrace the Gregorian, this time in honor of Pope Gregory XIII, who imposed the way of counting time that we now use, in his bull ‘Inter Gravissimas’, thanks to the “crucial contribution” of the School of Salamanca, issued on February 24, 1582, as explained to EFE by the professor at the University of Salamanca and an expert on the subject, Ana María Carabias.
In this way, as the professor indicates in her book ‘Salamanca and the measure of time’, the idea that the Church of Rome was looking for was to create a way of counting time that would allow “linking the different rhythm of the sun and the moon”, to create a link between the main seasonal cycles, such as the arrival of spring or equinox, with Easter or Resurrection or the ancient cult of the eternal sun -winter solstice- adopted by the Romans with Christmas.
Remove 11 days from any month
It is there where the thinkers from Salamanca devised a mathematical procedure that made it possible, for example, as the solar year surpassed the ecclesiastical year by a little more than 10 minutes and 4 seconds and the Julian calendar advanced 1 day every 134 years, from the School of Salamanca proposed, among other measures, to remove from any month the 11 days of solar advance that had almost accumulated or to suppress 1 day of each month during any year.
Thus, in practice, a Spaniard of the time went to bed on October 4, 1582 and got up on the 15th of the same month, when the bull promulgated by the Pope was applied to the Hispanic Crown of Felipe II on these dates, which was finally he opted for the proposal to remove eleven days from any given month.
The Gregorian reform of the calendar was initially implemented in Catholic countries, Spain was followed by France and Denmark, which also adopted it in 1582; the Netherlands and the Swiss cantons, in 1583; the Catholic states of Germany, in 1584; Poland in 1587 and Hungary in 1590 or the Protestant states, which did not admit the reform until 1700.
The last to officially adopt the Gregorian calendar, explains Carabias, have been: Japan, 1873; China, 1912; Russia, 1918 (although not its Orthodox Church); Romania and Yugoslavia, 1919; Greece, 1924 and Turkey, 1927.
Why Ukraine stops celebrating it on January 7
This 11-day asynchrony between the Gregorian and Julian calendars caused, from its origin, that the main Christian festivals did not coincide among those who adopted the new system, such as the Catholics at the beginning and the Protestants later or the Orthodox, who still They continue to govern their festivals by the ancient Roman calendar.
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It is for this reason that, while Catholics celebrate the birth of Jesus every December 25, Orthodox do not do it until 11 days later, on January 7, something that Orthodox Christians in Ukraine have agreed to stop doing when leaving the Julian calendar that the Russian patriarch follows by the Gregorian calendar that Ukrainian Catholics already followed, all in order to get away from Russia’s sphere of influence, especially after the start of the war between the two countries.
Still, while many Ukrainians decided to celebrate Christmas on December 25 for the first time this year to underscore unity with the larger part of the Christian world, a large number stick to the traditional January 7 celebration.