The Council of Nicaea, Christian unity and a common date for Easter

The various liturgical calendars, which are used in the largest part of Christianity, are a happy coincidence in 2025: Easter Sunday is celebrated on the same day in almost every Christian church, be it Protestant, Catholic or eastern Orthodox. Due to the alignment of the lunar cycles, which determine the date of the main festival of Christianity in both Julian and Gregorian calendars, April 20 this year is an almost universal celebration for supporters of Christ and the believers of his good news. It will happen again in 2028, but in most years the Easter date between east and west varies very, sometimes by a month.

It wasn't always like that. As Pope Francis found in the week of prayer for Christian unity in January of this year, Christians shared an established formula for the calculation of the Easter date for more than 12 centuries until the Catholic Church adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1582. (Almost all Protestant churches celebrate on the same day as the Roman Catholics Easter.)

Celebrating Easter together seems to be a simple expression of the association, but it can also listen to new life in the efforts of the true Christian unity and the fulfillment of the prayer of Jesus in John 17:21.

It is not accidental that such an initiative is going on as soon as the Christian churches celebrate the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, because it was at this significant ecumenical assembly that the early church fathers found that Easter would be celebrated after the first moon after the Vernal equinoxus. In Nicaea, the early Christians also approved a standard expression of their common beliefs: the Nicene Creed. It remains unchanged until today; Even the later variation of this creed in the western churches – the Filioque clause – is almost always omitted by western Christians at joint celebrations with their eastern brothers and sisters, which they do not include.

To recognize this anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, Pope Francis is planning to Turkey at the end of May, including a meeting with Bartholomew I, the eastern Orthodox Patriarch von Konstantinople. Meeting between popes and patriarchs seem to be so common today that it doesn't even work up to date, but we should not forget that such a meeting would have been less than a century ago and unthinkable. As an Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras of Constantinople in 1964 with Pope Paul VI. In Jerusalem, it was the first time that such a meeting had been taking place for over five centuries. While the tensions between the eastern patriarchs that went beyond the Russian invasion of Ukraine – this year's meeting of a strenuous meeting was able to make this year, the symbolic value of the meeting is still powerful.

In a world that is shaped by division and dispute, the type of accord's consistency that the Nicaea Council has caused is not a little thing. Every person of faith can certainly admit that religion was often a cause of conflicts between different peoples or nations, and the history of Christianity is no exception to this sad reality. Christian religious wars may be largely of the past, but today our ecumenical efforts – nothing about our interreligious – can be affected by rancor and distrust. In this sense, the advice of Nicaaea and its legacy of 17 tithing are also because of the future of hope.

The first step towards a larger association between Christians is to recognize that the unit does not have to mean uniformity. The way to unity is not on the way of the claim that there are no differences between the Christian churches or that the differences are irrelevant. It is also not reasonable to expect – or even wanting – that every Christian experiences liturgy or prayer in the same way at any place. We cannot expect our Orthodox brothers and sisters to accept any structure and tradition that has developed in the Roman Catholic Church since the Great Schism from 1054 for thousands of years. Most Catholics would also not be willing to do the same in terms of orthodox or Protestant practices.

At the same time, Christians can recognize what we share, starting with the Nicene Creed, but much more. For almost all churches, our common understanding includes a common baptism; And for Catholics and the Orthodox, a mutual recognition of the validity of the sacraments of the others, including ordination and especially the Eucharist.

Our celebration of Nicaaea and our recognition of what we share together can also offer us another important lesson: unity is not always born in harmony. The end result of Nicaea could have been the establishment of a common creed, but the council itself was hardly an occasion for peaceful or complete agreement. Rather, theological disputes about the nature of Jesus – especially about the perspective known as Arianism – threatened to tear the early church in the church, and the council was largely called to solve these questions. This only happened after intensive debate and occasional physical violence among those present.

In other words, Nicaea teaches us that efforts to expect the unit can be messy. As long as Christians differ in their theology, ecclesiology, their worship structures and more, we can hardly wait for such differences to disappear with the signing of a document or an affection exchange. But the end result of participating in good faith with the difficult questions and beliefs that are at stake according to faith can still be a larger unit among all of us.

When we travel through Lent in the expectation of our Easter celebration this year, we mature in a prayer that is offered during an ecumenical prayer god in Rome in January. As an anniversary of the Council of Nicaea “one year of grace, an opportunity for all Christians who recite the same creed and believe in the same God,” said Francis: “Let us rediscover the common roots of faith; Let us preserve unit! Always let us go ahead! May the unit we are all looking for are found. “