Easter moon

Today is the first day of the Sacred Lent. In this section of a MaltaMedia special Easter feature, Martin Galea De Giovanni & Alexei Pace explain how the date for Easter is determined:

Christians celebrate two major feasts that symbolise the birth and death of Christ. Unlike Christmas, which as we all know is always on the 25th of December, Easter Sunday does not fall on a same day every year. The date of Easter is primarily used for liturgical purposes. Up to the eighth century there was no uniform method for determining the date of Easter but the method favoured by the Council of Nicaea in AD 325 gradually became the accepted method. The adoption of the Gregorian calendar necessitated some modifications to this scheme but it is still basically the same.

The "popular" rule (for Roman Catholics and most Protestant denominations) is that Easter is on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the March equinox. The actual rule is similar, except that the astronomical equinox is not used; the date is fixed at March 21. And the astronomical full moon is not used; an "ecclesiastical" new moon is determined by adopted tables based on the Metonic cycle, and "full" is taken as the 14th day of that lunation. There are auxiliary rules that make March 22 the earliest possible date for Easter and April 25 the latest. The reasons for this are that the method is then independent of longitude on the Earth and is thus independent of Time Zone. It also allows the date of Easter to be calculated in advance regardless of the actual motion of the Earth around the Sun...

MaltaMedia feature:Holy Week and Easter in Malta and Gozo.