1967 Letter of Fr. Basil Sakkas on the Calendar Innovation

Dear brother in Christ according to our common Faith, Elias:

Thank you for your letter of April 2/15. I am answering you publicly, since the instruction and edification of the faithful is of more concern to me than the opinion of the readers of Le Monde. I cannot adapt my answer to "those without" and “those within." I do not speak from a "double heart" and I do not look for "the glory of men"; therefore, I have but one answer for all. Everyone will understand it according to his place in the plan of God’s economy. That many will say This is a hard saying, who can hear it? (John 6:60) is inevitable. I think, then, that rather than satisfying the curiosity of the inquisitive, it is better to "redeem the time" by making the brethren steadfast in our most holy Faith, so that, “the one edifying the other," we may with great reason face up to the demands of the Word of God.

Today the faithful are passing through a great crisis -- a crisis that according to the warning of our Saviour Christ will become increasingly worse as the end approaches. For as Satan knows he has only a short time, so much the more does he seek to mislead even the elect, if possible (Matt. 24:24; Mark 13:22). This too is a hard saying, but then the whole Gospel is a series of hard sayings for those who are "slow to hear."

Many believers think in good faith that the question of the calendar and of the Church feasts is of secondary importance, if indeed it has any meaning at all. They even cite Biblical texts like this one from the Apostle Paul: Let no man judge you... in respect of a holyday, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days... (Col. 2:16) or again: Ye observe days, and months, and times, and years. I am afraid for you, lest I have bestowed upon you labor in vain (Gal. 4:10).

Let us not forget, however, that it is to our profit if we clap our hand over our mouth like Abba Kopri whenever we quote texts from Scripture, especially if we are not rightly dividing the Word of Truth. Here the Apostle is condemning the ritualists of his day (and they exist in every period), i.e., those who having confined their religious life to outward tokens of worship made them the conditions of salvation. With these misguided people what is outside themselves has no relation to what is inside; the ritual form does not correspond to an inner spiritual reality; and they pass off counterfeit money, seeking to justify themselves in ignorance of the Grace of Christ.

This does not mean, however, that someone who has tasted the Grace of Christ is an unruly believer who forgets that "God is not a God of disorder and confusion, but of order and peace," and who consequently acts as he pleases rather than as one organ in a single body. No organ of the body operates by itself, but each operation of every organ (ear, foot, eye, etc.) requires the simultaneous and harmonious operation of all the functions of the other organs. Look at the Apostle Paul himself -- preeminently the Apostle and preacher of Grace, and who is quoted above -- with what obedience and piety did he submit to the regulations of the Jewish faithful, -- how he made prayers, cut his hair, undertook a long journey to be present at Jerusalem and worship on the day of Pentecost! Why did he not stay in Corinth, since the Lord is no longer worshipped at Jerusalem, or on Mt. Garisim, but "in spirit and in truth"? Why should he wish to celebrate Pentecost in the spring and not celebrate it in the autumn, for example, when he would be going to Jerusalem on other business anyway? See where he himself keeps "days, and months, and times"! Let us then be very careful when we quote the Divine and Sacred Scripture.

These days, even from those who occupy high places in the Church, we hear various slogans that disquiet us. E.g., "Today's problems are new, and these new problems demand new solutions." Space does not permit me to amplify this point, but simply to emphasize that slogans for aggiornamento, for "bringing the Church up to date," are heresies and diabolical traps. Man's need is always one and the same, and has not changed from the time he lost the Presence of God. Man’s sole and principal need -- a matter of life and death -- is to find his God again. If this need is not satisfied, all other satisfactions are ersatz goods of the worst quality, which only create need upon need in a vicious circle; and like the woman with the issue of blood people will pay out money hand over fist to so-called "doctors" with no result, because they have still not approached the fringe of His garment and felt the power issuing from it. Truth neither grows old nor becomes outdated, neither goes out of style; it never requires revision or "modernizing" -- aggiornamento. Truth is God, and thus it always remains timely and unchanging.

However, we shall never help the faithful find God and the truth by coddling the laziness and the torpor of our "deceitful and corrupted heart," which asks nothing more than to sink itself even further into that torpor and get itself even further away from its Creator and Savior. And certainly, it is not by cutting down on the fasts, by holding monasticism in contempt, by being ignorant of the Church feasts, not by "This doesn't matter," "That's outdated," and a third "It does not appeal to to the twentieth-century taste" that we shall be roused from our sluggishness and made aware of the risks we are running. 

That "Nevermind" and that "It's not important" are tiny cracks in the dyke through which the ocean will one day overwhelm us all. Look at the Orthodox Finns. At first the new-calendarists promised everyone that at least they would leave the Paschal cycle of Feasts in its traditional place. See them now, however; they did not stop there. They changed the Paschal cycle too. The Feast of feasts, the Solemnity of solemnities, they no longer celebrate with us, their brethren in our common Faith, but with the Occidentals. They no longer read the same daily Gospel with us; they no longer chant hymns of the same tone. Many people will tell me that in the beginning Pascha was not celebrated simultaneously in the East and West even though at that time both were still one, and will bring up other similar arguments, all taken completely out of context. I am neither a theologian nor a learned man, but I do know that to keep Pascha with the Occidentals and to communicate from the same chalice both come to one and the same thing. Those who regard us as backward or as fanatics do so because unfortunately, they think of Orthodoxy as a mere ideology, as being a theory like any other product of the brain, and not as a heart that has a single heartbeat. For those of us who are backward, however, Orthodoxy is a heart-beat, the pulse of life that circulates through the whole man in all of his expressions (body-spirit-soul). We believe (even if others think we are out of our mind) that the very hairs on the head of someone who lives Orthodoxy are different from those of people who are not Orthodox.

As I will try to explain further on, the way in which the new calendar has been adopted shakes the fundamental notions and principles of the Church of Christ, the single Body which the Lord has purchased at the cost of His own Blood, and which He founded and consecrated on the day of Pentecost.

1. The question of astronomical accuracy. The new-calendarists allege that they do not follow the Gregorian (papal) religious calendar, but that they have "corrected" the Orthodox Julian calendar so as to keep it from being in astronomical error. Thus, their newly-published liturgical books carry the note, "According to the corrected Julian calendar." In reality, however, it is a matter of adopting the Gregorian religious calendar of the West. Today it is well-known that, astronomically considered, both calendars are faulty. If the new-calendarists really wish for the astronomical correction of the calendar, then why do they not rectify it on the basis of the most recent data of astronomical science, instead of adopting the religious calendar of Rome, which, as it happens, is also astronomically wrong? How is the calendar being corrected? The new-calendarists tell us waggishly: "Ah, but with your calendar, pretty soon we'd be having Christinas in August!" They would do better not to purvey their wit so cheaply. Nowhere is it written that we have to have snow to celebrate Christ's Nativity. And let us not forget that when we here celebrate the Nativity with snow, our Orthodox brethren from Australia and elsewhere, who are keeping the feast at the same time we do, find themselves at the height of summer. Let us not make frivolous judgements, then, and let us not be "children in understanding" but "babes in malice" (I Cor. 14:20) And if we wished to be witty in turn, we would remind you that before we have Christmas in August, it is quite likely that Christ will already have come. Instead of changing times and seasons, we had better get ready for His coming and leave astronomy in the observatory. Astronomy really should be at the service of the Church in any case, and not the Church given over to astronomical balancing acts. For a believer, time has a completely different meaning from that indicated by the motion of the stars. For the believer, past, present, and future are harmoniously fused, because in Christ Jesus we abandon human temporal limits and even from this very present are tasters of heavenly things.

2. The unity of the Church. I said above that the Church of Christ is a single Body; and the Apostle says of the organs of this single Body that "if one organ suffers, all the other organs suffer with it; if one organ rejoices, all the other organs rejoice with it. So then even in our worship, it is as one entire Body that the Church rejoices, mourns, or celebrates, depending on the occasion; whereas now that the new-calendarists have allegedly "corrected" the calendar, at the moment when some are celebrating the Saviour's Nativity, others are still in the midst of the fast. Thus we ask: is it really worthwhile to change a calendar that was instituted by Ecumenical Synods, with which our fathers were made Saints, with which the Martyrs shed their blood, and with which the Church has lived for twenty centuries? - is it really worth the trouble to change it for another alleged to be astronomically more exact (though it too is in error), and thus to shatter this wonderful unity, and to create confusion and division and disorder in the flock? Since the Orthodox conscience has rejected the Gregorian calendar -- because we must not forget that the new-calendarists constitute a mere fraction of the Orthodox, scarcely ten per cent, while ninety per cent follow the calendar of the Fathers, and keep Pascha and its related feasts (in the Triodion and the Pentecostarion) according to the ancient reckoning -- we ask: Who in fact are the ones disturbing the peace, mutual understanding, and concord of the Church? -- the fanatical and backward old-calendarists, or the "liberal" and "progressive" new-calendarists? Who in fact are the ones who raise disputes and create problems where they do not exist? Who in fact are the ones preoccupied with "days and times and years"? We, the backward and fanatic old-calendarists, do not deify days and calendars, nor do we regard one day as "holier" than another because of something in the nature of that particular day. We believe that the Church, if there is a reason, can move a feast to another date, and we have innumerable examples of the Church’s doing so. However, first, there must be a good reason for such a change; secondly, it must not disrupt the Church’s unity and order; thirdly, it must be done freely and with-out coercion by the Church as a whole; and fourthly, it must not be done simply in a spirit of "modernizing" or just to copy others.

3. Liturgical unity. I have spoken of liturgical unity. It is appropriate here to remind ourselves of various examples of ecclesiastical disorder proceeding from the partial adoption of the Gregorian calendar:

- There is no unity of feast and fast, as we have seen above.

- The fast of the Holy Apostles is reduced, and often is simply eliminated when Pascha comes late.

- The feast of St. George often falls inside the Great Lent and has to be transferred to the Monday after Pascha.

- The Kyriakodromion, or series of Biblical readings, is altered on account of the intercalation of the Feast of the Exaltation of the Precious Cross; i.e., whereas previously all Orthodox read the same passage from the Bible every day in the Church services, disorder has reached such a point that now they do not.

If I were a specialist, I could enumerate other irregularities, but these ought to suffice.

4. The question of papal arbitrariness. As everybody knows, the occupant of the Roman See, through his schism and heresy, has cut himself off from the Body of the Church of Christ. Holding himself superior to councils, even to the Ecumenical Synods, and in consequence of this heretical view, he deemed it good, in the 16th century, to change the calendar by his own volition and without the consent of the Church. The Roman pontiff acts according to his own views; but the Church of Christ, judging his views and acts to be incompatible with the facts of Orthodox catholic dogma, condemns them and also the matter of the calendar. This "New" or "Gregorian" or "Papal" calendar was outlawed and anathematized by the Synodal Tome of a Council held long ago in Constantinople [in 1587 and again in 1593]. 

If the incumbent of Rome really loved the Church of Christ more than his own system, he would first reunite himself, through repentance and profession of the Orthodox Faith, to the Church of Christ from which he has cut himself off, and then offer his opinion on the calendar to the Church and submit to her judgment, as the rest of us Orthodox do.

Certainly, those who hold the current "ecumenical" views will ridicule what we have said as being antiquated and out of date. Let them not forget, however, that these upstart theories of theirs, since they are not on the side of Tradition, will all collapse sooner or later, and the prophetic word will again be heard: For from the least of them even to the greatest they have all committed iniquity; from the priest even to the false prophet they have all wrought falsely. And they healed the breach of my people, making light of it, and saying 'Peace, peace': and where is peace? They were ashamed because they failed; yet they were not ashamed as those who are truly ashamed, and they knew not their own disgrace: therefore shall they utterly fall when they do fall, and in the time of visitation shall they perish, said the Lord. Thus saith the Lord, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths of the Lord; and see what is the good way, and walk in it, and ye shall find purification for your souls. But they said, 'We will not walk in them' (Jer. 6:13-16).

5. The question of hierarchical arbitrariness. In the Orthodox Church the only Leader is Christ, and His Delegate on earth is the Holy Spirit. No bishop or patriarch is regarded as the leader of the Church of Christ on earth, and none of them can make a decisive judgment regarding a question that concerns the whole Church, as, e.g., that of worship does. Nor can any local Church adopt a different line from that of the Church as a whole. If, for example, there is an urgent need to change the religious calendar, a Pan-Orthodox Synod -- that is, an Ecumenical Synod -- must be called in which all the local Orthodox Churches can participate freely. Only such a Synod can be regarded as competent to make decisions and ordinances about such a matter.

When, however, a single hierarch or a single local Church willfully and incompetently makes a decision of this sort, it is obvious that the synodical foundations of the Orthodox Church are being shaken, and that precedents are being set that will have disastrous results in the future.

6. The question of the relations between Church and state. I do not have space here to treat so thorny a subject. However, it cannot be doubted that in the matter of changing the calendar, politics and diplomacy have played the greatest role -- influences most detrimental to a free and living Church. Nevertheless, the Churches of Jerusalem, of Russia, of Bulgaria, of Serbia, and the Holy Mountain of Athos, among others, keep to the Orthodox Julian calendar of the Fathers, regardless of the commercial calendar, which does not concern us. And it is to our shame and their credit that the Moslems and the Jews keep their religious calendars inviolate, whereas we Orthodox, the one Church of Christ on earth, we who are the depositories of the Truth revealed to the Prophets, the Apostles, and the Fathers, -- we let ourselves be borne and carried about by every blast of the winds of Western innovation.

Do you see then, brother, how many issues the calendar question raises? To what degree non-Orthodox can or cannot comprehend them, I do not know.

With love in the Lord, 

Father Basil

Source: Translated from “La question du calendrier Orthodoxe," in La Foi transmise, May 1967, pp. 5-11, published by the priest of the Swiss Orthodox community ("St. Nectarios of Aegina") of Geneva. Le Lumignon qui fume is the official organ of the same community. Published in The Orthodox Word, Aug-Sep 1967, pp. 130-136 (slightly corrected).