January 1,
2014
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Blog
8
On the night of October
4, 1582, the citizens of Spain and its colonies, Portugal, Poland,
and most of Italy went to bed and woke up 10 days later.
The peculiar event was not some medieval miracle but
was, in fact, an effort by the Church to bring about a badly needed
change to time. Having decreed months before that a reform of the
calendar was essential for the good of Western civilization, Pope
Gregory XIII (r. 1572–1585) implemented a new calendar on the night
of October 4. The next day, part of the massive fix of the Julian
calendar, was not counted as October 5 but October 15, 1582. The
calendar reform proved one of the most important and impressive
accomplishments for the progress of Europe in the whole of the
Renaissance.
For critics of the Church, the 16th century is a
seeming treasury of embarrassments for Catholics—from the so-called
“bad popes,” to the Inquisition, to the Protestant Reformation. But
the crown jewel for criticism, of course, is Galileo and his
supposed persecution by an obscurantist, tyrannical, and
unenlightened papacy. Lost in much of the rhetoric surrounding
Galileo, however, was the immense accomplishment of Pope Gregory
XIII in bringing desperately needed changes to the calendar.
The problem has always been the fact that a year cannot
contain neatly organized days or months. Put simply, the interval
between successive vernal equinoxes (every 365.2424 days) is
approximately 11 minutes less than 365 1/4 days. At the same time,
the synodic period of the moon (i.e., the time between each full
moon or new moon) is around 29 1/2 days, so that 12 months add up
to only about 354 days. A calendar that incorporates both the
movements of the sun and moon thus becomes quite a challenge, and
people of many civilizations have certainly given it their best
shot.
Ancients’
Days
The most influential, not
to mention widely adopted, effort to solve the dilemma was the
Julian calendar, introduced by Julius Caesar in 45 B.C. to replace
the longstanding Roman calendar that had grown hopelessly
inaccurate by the use of the lunar year and the intercalary month.
His idea, with a little help from Sosigenes, an Alexandrine
astronomer, was to create a solar calendar with months of fixed
lengths. Rather than try to introduce a gentle change, Caesar
instituted what became called the “year of confusion” by adding 90
days to the year to realign the months of the Roman calendar with
the seasons. The first Julian year commenced with January 1, 46
B.C. and the 708th year from the foundation of the city.
The result was that the
average length of the Julian calendar year was 365.25 days. To
account as best it could for the subtle but important deviations in
the passage of time, every fourth year included an intercalary day
to maintain synchrony between the calendar year and the tropical
year. Caesar organized the first, third, fifth, seventh, ninth, and
eleventh months (i.e., January, March, May, July, September, and
November) to have 31 days, and the other months 30, excepting
February, which in common years should have only 29 days, but every
fourth year 30 days. To keep himself even with his illustrious
predecessor, Emperor Augustus added an extra day to August to have
as many days as July—which had been named after the first Caesar.
So, a day was taken from February and given to August; to prevent
three months straight of 31 days, September and November were
reduced to 30 days, and October and December were assigned 31. The
additional day every fourth year was added to February, the
shortest month. In modern calendars, of course, the intercalary day
is still added to February, but as the 29th.
Time
Shifts
The Julian calendar remained in use throughout the
entire history of the Roman Empire. The Church naturally adopted it
in the development of the liturgical calendar. Easter was placed on
the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal
(spring) equinox. Obviously, then, the calculation of the equinox
assumed considerable and understandable importance. If the equinox
was wrong, then Easter was celebrated on the wrong day and the
placement of most of the other observances—such as the starts of
Lent and Pentecost—would also be in error.
As the Julian calendar was far from perfect, errors did
indeed begin to creep into the keeping of time. Because of the
inherent imprecision of the calendar, the calculated year was too
long by 11 minutes and 14 seconds. The problem only grew worse with
each passing year as the equinox slipped backwards one full day on
the calendar every 130 years. For example, at the time of its
introduction, the Julian calendar placed the equinox on March 25.
By the time of the Council of Nicea in 325, the equinox had fallen
back to March 21. By 1500, the equinox had shifted by 10 days.
The 10 days were of increasing importance also to
navigation and agriculture, causing severe problems for sailors,
merchants, and farmers whose livelihood depended upon precise
measurements of time and the seasons. At the same time, throughout
the Middle Ages, the use of the Julian calendar brought with it
many local variations and peculiarities that are the constant
source of frustration to historians. For example, many medieval
ecclesiastical records, financial transactions, and the counting of
dates from the feast days of saints did not adhere to the standard
Julian calendar but reflected local adjustments. Not surprisingly,
confusion was the result.
The Church Saves
Time
The Church was aware of the inaccuracy, and by the end
of the 15th century there was widespread agreement among Church
leaders that not celebrating Easter on the right day—the most
important and most solemn event on the calendar—was a scandal.
Pope Sixtus IV (r. 1471-1484) made the first effort to
reform the calendar, hiring the astronomer Johann Müller who,
unfortunately, was murdered soon after. As the work of other
astronomers could not gain universal acceptance owing to problems
of competing national interests and varying opinions, the Church
remained the best chance of promulgating a definitive solution to a
growing crisis.
Pope St. Pius V introduced a new breviary in 1568 and
missal in 1570 in keeping with the mandate of the Council of Trent,
and both of the new texts included adjustments to the lunar tables
and the leap-year system. The problem of Easter, however remained,
as did the basic difficulties with the Julian calendar.
In 1563, the Council of Trent had approved a plan in
principle to restore the date of the vernal equinox to that of 325
and to install the needed changes to the calendar to make the
calculation of Easter more accurate. Italian astronomer and doctor
Luigi Lilius proposed a solution in his ambitious work Compendium
novae rationis restituendi kalendarium (Compendium of the New Plan
for the Restoration of the Calendar). He suggested a slow, 10-day
correction to amend the temporal drift since Nicaea and a more
careful application of the leap day. Lilius died in 1576, but his
brother presented his theories to the one person who could
something about them—the pope.
Cardinal Ugo Buoncompagni had been elected Pope Gregory
XIII on May 13, 1572 as successor to Pope Pius, and he was
determined to fix things once and for all. Happily receiving the
manuscript, the pope appointed a commission to investigate
solutions. He placed at its head a Jesuit mathematician and
astronomer named Christoph Clavius. The basic ideas of Lilius were
adopted, but Clavius preferred that any correction should take
place in one sweeping move rather than a gradual implementation.
The commission’s recommendations were then presented to the pope
and were promulgated by the pontiff in the papal bull Inter
Gravissimus, signed on February 24, 1582.
Like Julius Caesar before him, the pope agreed that
small adjustments were no longer viable. Instead, he decreed that
Clavius’ approach should be followed: 10 days would be removed from
the calendar. So October 4 was followed by October 15. With one
act, the vernal equinox of 1583 and those that followed would occur
around March 20, a date much closer to that of the Council of
Nicaea. To overcome the challenge of losing one day every 130
years, the new calendar omitted three leap years every 400 years,
so that century years were leap years only when divisible by 400.
Using this method, 1600 and 2000 were leap years but 1700, 1800 and
1900 were not.
Technically, the pope could not decree that nations and
kingdoms adopt the new calendar, but its value was noted
immediately in repairing centuries of inaccuracy on the part of the
Julian calendar. The new calendar was first inaugurated in Spain,
Portugal, Spanish colonies in the New World, the Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth, and most of Italy. The Holy Roman Empire followed,
and then the rest of the Catholic world. France deployed the new
calendar in December 1582.
Stuck in the
Past
Had the reform occurred a century before, of course, it
would have been much easier to implement across all of what was
then a united Christendom. As it was, in a post-Reformation Europe,
the new computations were greeted with suspicion in the lands that
were no longer Catholic. Protestant Germany adopted the calendar
slowly. Prussia accepted it in 1610, while the rest of the
Protestant states decreed it only in 1700.
The English, especially during the reign of Queen
Elizabeth I (r. 1558-1603), rejected any thought of adopting a
calendar created under the name of a pope and remained long
suspicious that this was some Catholic plot. Consequently, even as
anti-Catholic bigots in the English Isles lampooned the popes as
enemies of progress, they were 10 days behind everyone else in
Western Europe for over 150 years. And after the leap year of 1700,
they were 11 days behind. The English compounded the dating dilemma
further by celebrating New Year not on January 1 but according to
the older custom of March 25. As the American colonies adhered to
the English system, they shared in the temporal displacement.
Americans now celebrate the birth of George Washington on February
22, 1732, according to the Gregorian calendar. However, according
to the English reckoning, he was born on February 11, 1731-32.
Acknowledging at last that the continued use of the
Julian calendar and celebrating New Year on March 25 were “attended
with divers inconveniences,” the British Parliament passed the
Calendar (New Style) Act in 1750. The New Year would begin on
January 1 rather than March 25 and time would be counted according
to the Gregorian calendar. The act went into effect on September 2,
1752, and the next day was decreed as September 14, 1782.
Russia and the Eastern Orthodox Churches rejected the
new calendar and continued to use the Julian calendar in their
calculations for Easter. The Gregorian calendar was accepted as the
civic calendar in Russia only after the Russian Revolution in 1917.
The Eastern Orthodox continue to use a revised Julian calendar,
with the exception of the Finnish Orthodox Church, which adopted
the Gregorian calendar.
The Gregorian calendar is the most widely used calendar
in the world today and has fulfilled well the.aspirations of Pope
Gregory XIII. And so, the same Church that was supposedly the
obstacle to progress and science gave to the world a reliable means
of counting the days that has withstood the test of time
itself.
Article
source: http://www.catholic.com/magazine/articles/the-day-the-church-altered-time
