ISTANBUL (RNS) — This year, Eastern and Western churches will celebrate Easter on the same date — an occurrence that is increasingly rare but that some seek to make permanent.
The dates lined up in 2017 and often do about once a decade. But as the years go by, the calendars used by churches — the Gregorian calendar by Western Catholics and Protestants and the Julian calendar by Eastern Orthodox churches — continue to diverge. If all things stay the same, the coincidence will happen a few more times in the 21st century and then not again for nearly a millennium.
Many church leaders, especially in countries with diverse Christian communities, are viewing the joint date as an intercommunal celebration.
“For the Holy Great Church of Christ, one source of such resurrectional joy is also found this year in the common celebration of Easter by the entire Christian world,” Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople Bartholomew I, the spiritual leader of Eastern Orthodox Christians across the world, said in his Holy Week Encyclical on Monday (April 14).
Though Christians today make up less than half of a percentage of Turkey’s population, the Christian community of Istanbul includes denominations with diverse theological, cultural and linguistic heritages, including Greek Orthodox, Armenian, Syriac, Catholic and Protestant.
“The life of the church in Istanbul is made up of connections with other churches. It is not like, for example, …