An Official Apology

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I offer an official apology to all those who use our St. Joseph parish wall calendars. “Catholic Inspirations” published by Comda Advertising Connections. The calendar indicates that on Wednesday we will have a new moon. In fact we will have a full moon on Wednesday.

Please forgive us for this error. Of course it is extremely important. If we don’t know when the full moon comes, we won’t know when the most important day of the year comes. The first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. (Easter!)

The good news is that we can remedy the calendar error simply by looking up at the sky at night.* You can tell by looking that the calendar is two weeks off, when it comes to the lunar cycle.

In other words: God is omnipotently merciful. We make mistakes and screw things up, in our little domain. But God serenely continues to God, without fail, without interruption.

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*Looking up at the sky at night will solve the two-week discrepancy with the St. Joseph wall calendar. This year, however, actually involves an interesting anomaly. In determining the date of Easter, the Church does not follow only the observable astronomical facts; we also applying some additional rules. If we did go solely by the sun and moon, then Easter could come on a different day, depending on where you live on the globe.

AD 2019 involves an unusual case, when astronomical Easter and ecclesiastical Easter do not fall on the same day. The vernal equinox this year falls on March 20, when we will have a full moon. So, astronomically speaking, we should celebrate Easter this Sunday. But, according to the rules that apply in the Church (in order to avoid having two Easters in two different parts of the world) a full moon on March 20 does not count. The Paschal moon cannot come before March 21. (This is why Easter seems to come ‘so late’ this year.)

One thought on “An Official Apology

  1. Mais non mon ami. Just a goofy calendar convention. Open circles are full moons. Ones that are filled in are “dark.” Checked several calendars and found this to be true. But that raises the question if Spring begins on March 20 and the full moon is on March 21, then why isn’t Easter on March 24? Checked the Old Farmers Almanac and found that the equinox and the full moon actually occur on the SAME DAY in March 2019. So I guess the Church algorithm that says AFTER really means AFTER.

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