Former Foreign Minister Teodor Baconschi and Professor Adrian Papahagi, both close to the Romanian Orthodox Church, requested on Sunday through posts on social networks that the BOR celebrate Easter together with Catholics and Protestants.
“The Easter gap between the Orthodox and the rest of the Christian world seems like a relic of the Cold War. The Orthodox peoples, freed from communism, kept asking the hierarchies to synchronize the calendar, without result. The highlight is that BOR is not old-style, so they could celebrate Easter together with Catholics and Protestants (as the Orthodox in Finland and Estonia do). Still, we’re going with the Russians—and their Julian calendar, uncorrected. That is, the same as those who sabotaged pan-Orthodox unity both through the inter-Orthodox war in Ukraine and through the arrogant non-participation in the Synod of Crete (2016),” Baconschi wrote on Sunday.
Teodor Baconschi was Romania’s ambassador to the Vatican, and in 1989 he founded the Reflection Group for the Renewal of the Church, together with the future Patriarch Daniel.
For his part, Adrian Papahagi announced that he will ask the collective governing bodies of the BOR to change the date of the Easter holiday, saying that the current delay is a problem for Romanians in the diaspora, who cannot benefit from the days off granted by the Catholic Easter.
“After Easter, I will initiate an extensive national effort, requesting the National Church Assembly and the Holy Synod of the Romanian Orthodox Church to calculate the date of Easter on the Gregorian calendar (which takes into account Christmas anyway) so that we can celebrate the Resurrection together with all Western Christianity (including and here, for example, the Finnish Orthodox), and alongside our Catholic or Protestant fellow citizens, be they Hungarians, Saxons, Romanians or whatever. This calendar gap is also very troublesome for the millions of Romanians who live in the West, but cannot take advantage of the days off granted by their states of residence, to celebrate Easter with their relatives in the country, and have to take additional days off “, Papahagi wrote.
