The Shepherd, August 2009
Palaioimerologites (Gr. for Old Calendarists), a term used for the 200,000 Greek Orthodox who broke ecclesiastical ties with the main Greek Orthodox Church because of the official Church’s change in 1924 from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar. [While accurate statistics are difficult to ascertain and the Old Calendarist population has dwindled, at the outset of the movement, the number of Old Calendarists was many times this number.] In the late 30s they split to form two separate hierarchies. There are about 250 Old Calendar Greek priests [this is an absurdly underestimated statistic] who keep alive among the faithful people the burning conviction that there is an immense importance in maintaining the 13 days that separate the liturgical cycle (the Kingdom of God) from the official state calendar (the Kingdom of this world). The Old Calendarists consider the other Greek Orthodox who follow the Gregorian calendar as heretical [this is not universally true and is an outrageous statement] and refuse to communicate with them. [Old Calendarists, by virtue of their opposition to the calendar innovation, do not have intercommunion with the New Calendarist innovators.] All the monks on Mt. Athos, except those of Vatopedi follow the Old Calendar. [All of the monastic institutions on Mt. Athos presently follow the Old Calendar.] There are two such parishes in the United States. [There are, in fact, scores of Old Calendar Greek parishes in the U.S. and Canada.]20
It is, to address these misperceptions (beyond our bracketed interjections above), under the banner of the Church Calendar, and not out of an absurd worship of days, that we Orthodox resisters carry out our opposition to the ecumenical movement and the Papacy. This is because the issue of Church Calendar is, in actuality, closely tied to the doctrine of Papal supremacy and to the emergence of ecumenical ideas that, as we have demonstrated, erode the very foundations of our Orthodox Faith.
A. The Papacy and the Calendar Issue. With regard to the Papacy, the Gregorian Calendar was imposed on Western Christianity by the authority of the Pope, as we observed earlier. Issues of astronomical accuracy—which are not of concern to us here—aside, beyond the divisions and strife that the adoption of the Gregorian Calendar by various Orthodox Churches produced, our resistance to the Papal Calendar is also an expression of our opposition to the notion that Pope Gregory XIII, acting as “sovereign pontiff,” had the authority to impose his calendar reform on the world. The rabidly anti-Protestant Gregory, who considered the calendar reform an effective tool in the Counter-Reformation, generated similar resistance to Papal power in Protestant Europe, where the Gregorian Calendar was not adopted for several centuries after its imposition: Germany, Switzerland, Holland, Denmark, and Norway in 1700, and England and the American colonies, where the Gregorian (or New) Calendar was considered a “Popish” device, only in 1752. We Old Calendarists, therefore, have an historical counterpart in such Western European and American colonial resistance to Papism, and it is only historical amnesia that allows ecclesiastical polemicists to dismiss our concerns as outlandish or eccentric.
B. Ecumenism and the Calendar Issue. It is an indisputable fact that the advocacy of the calendar reform in the twentieth century had its roots in the ecumenical policies first embraced officially by the Orthodox Church in an encyclical promulgated by the Œcumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople in 1920. As part of its program for the reunification of the Orthodox and heterodox Christian confessions, the Patriarchate proposed that Christians everywhere accept “a uniform calendar for the celebration of the great Christian feasts at the same time by all the churches.”21 It moved forward with this plan, not by offering as a model of uniformity the ancient Orthodox Church Calendar, but by adopting, in 1924, the Papal Calendar (or, as it was euphemistically and a bit ridiculously styled, the “Revised Julian Calendar”). This action was justified by the rejection of the Julian Calendar, by which the Orthodox Church Feasts are partly calculated, on the grounds of its “astronomical” insufficiencies, which were put forth in such a clearly unscientific and naive way as to be embarrassing.
The hodgepodged New Church Calendar which Constantinople adopted (as did the Church of Greece and other local Orthodox Churches shortly thereafter), crudely grafting the traditional Paschalion of the Orthodox Church onto a festal cycle determined by the Gregorian Calendar, was to suffice until such a time as the Orthodox Paschalion could also be abandoned for the celebration of a common Pascha by all Christians. That goal has not yet been achieved by the innovators, who nonetheless still see it, along with the New Calendar, as an essential component of Orthodox participation in the ecumenical movement. Hence, while the Orthodox Churches of Russia, Serbia, Georgia, and Jerusalem, among others, still follow the Old Calendar, but are to varying degrees active in such ecumenical organizations as the World Council of Churches, they too have flirted from time to time with the idea of adopting the New Calendar or the Western date for Pascha. On account of this—and because of their communion with the Orthodox innovators and ecumenists who follow the New Calendar—the Holy Synod in Resistance does not commune with these Churches (being walled off from them, as it is from the New Calendarists, though not denying the Orthodox identity of either group), even if these Churches do follow the Old Calendar. This fact further brings into focus our fundamental raison d’être, which is not a witless commitment to the Church Calendar alone, but that of a sober, circumspect opposition to the compromising effects of ecumenism and Papism on the integrity of the Orthodox Church and its traditions, as evidenced in the calendar reform. In that opposition, our goal is not to condemn and divide our fellow Orthodox, but to return them to the fullness of Holy Tradition that is in the end, rising above temporary divisions, the fundamental unitive force of the Church in time space.
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