On Gregorian Calendar

The world celebrated the arrival of the new Gregorian year 2023 on Sunday and massive celebrations were held across the globe on the occasion. However, there was a clear divide seen in these revelries. The countries that have the Anno Domini as their official dating system marked the day, January 1, as the beginning of their new year while the countries that do not, referred to the date as the changing of the Gregorian calendar.

This qualifier – Gregorian – is an important distinction to make as it gives us a look at the calendar’s, often called the western calendar or the international calendar these days, past. If we are to believe that labels are not arbitrary and names are not assigned to elements on whims, then we must question what Gregorian means and what attributes it gives the now global almanack.

The Gregorian calendar, contrary to popular belief, at least in Nepal, did not begin after the birth of Jesus Christ. It does proclaim which ‘year of the Lord’ the world is in but it has little direct association with either Christ’s birth or death. In fact, it was introduced over a thousand years after Christ by Pope Gregory XIII (this is why it is called Gregorian) to change the date Easter was celebrated on.

Before the promulgation of this calendar, Europe followed the Julian calendar, drafted by, no points for guessing, Julius Caesar in 46 BC. However, as it turns out, Julius had miscalculated the length of a solar year by 11 minutes, which added up over the centuries and made the calendar out of sync with the natural seasons. This meant that Easter, the festival celebrated to mark the mythical resurrection of Christ three days after his death by crucifixion, fell further away from the spring equinox with each passing year.

This may not seem like a big deal to us today but in the 16th century, this was quite the scandal. The Catholic Church had been tolerating the divergence between the equinox and Easter for years, but the public, with their growing knowledge of astronomy, could not. This built pressure on the Church which finally implemented reform under Gregory.

But it was under an earlier pope that work to change the calendar began. In 1545, the Council of Trent authorised Pope Paul III to restore the equinox to the date it was supposed to be held on, as determined by the First Council of Nicaea in 325. It also asked Paul to take steps to prevent future misalignment. These instructions were all but directly asking the Pope to issue a new calendar.

The Church worked on this ‘restoration’ internally for 32 years and then sent its ‘draft’ to outside experts for review. Many suggestions were received but the one that was ultimately adopted was Italian doctor Aloysius Lilius’s proposal to reduce the number of leap years in four centuries from 100 to 97 based on a new scheme for adjusting the epacts of the Moon when fixing the date for Easter every year. 

This would also shorten the year by around 11 minutes, correcting the Julian calendar’s discrepancy that had been causing Easter to come forward by three days every four centuries for the past 1,200 years at that point.

But many objected. Humankind has always been frightened by change and the thought of altering an era older than the Christian faith felt alarming to many Christians themselves. But German mathematician Christopher Clavius, noted as the architect of the Gregorian calendar, zealously defended Lilius and emphasised his argument for the elimination of 10 days from the running year to turn Julian into the Gregorian year, literally overnight. Clavius was loud and he had access, both of which helped his voice reach the new pope Gregory.

Convinced, Gregory implemented the 10-day deletion and after the sun set on Thursday, October 4, 1582, of the Julian calendar, it rose on Friday, October 15, 1582, of the Gregorian calendar. And thus, a new era was born.

But it was not an era universally accepted from the get-go. In addition to non-European countries not even being aware of the new dating convention, the European protestant states refused to move to the calendar that they accused of being a ‘papal plot’. Over the coming centuries though, they relented and moved to what they called the ‘new style’ or the ‘improved calendar’. Colonisation also brought the calendar into use in many non-western countries. The last European country to adopt the Gregorian calendar was Greece which accepted it for civil use in 1923.

Today, only four countries do not use Gregorian dating in official capacities – Nepal, Afghanistan, Iran and Ethiopia. This, perhaps, makes us unique and gives us an identity of being a state with its native dating convention based on calculations its own scholars carry out with it and its populations at its centre. Nepal is also the only country that recognises more than one national calendar.