ECUMENISM
Catholics, Protestants and Jews are preparing this week to celebrate Easter (or Passover), essential religious feast both for Christians and Jews which this year, by chance, falls in the same week. On Sunday 9 April, Catholics and Protestants celebrated Palm Sunday, the feast with which the two Churches officially opened the celebration of Holy Week and Easter. The Easter triduum beings on Holy Thursday. In spite of various attempts, differences remain in the calendar between the Easter celebrated by the Christians of the West (Catholics and Protestants) and by the Christians of the East. The origin of the difference lies in the reform of the calendar in 1582: the Christians of the East maintained the Julian calendar, with the result that this year they are celebrating Easter on Sunday 23 April, whereas Catholics and Protestants adopted the Gregorian calendar: so there is a week’s difference between the date of Easter in the West (16 April) and the Orthodox Easter. By a strange coincidence, however, while Catholics and Protestants are beginning the Easter triduum on Holy Thursday, Jews are beginning the first day of Passover (“Pesach”, meaning “passing over”) on the very same day, namely Thursday 13 April. The feast strictly begins two days earlier, on 11 April, with the “search for leaven in the evening” and on 12 April with the “vigil of Pesach and the fast of the first-born”. The feast lasts a week and will end on Thursday 20 April. The Jewish Passover commemorates the liberation of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt. Before the celebrations, each home must be carefully cleaned of every “hametz” (any kind of leavened food, composed of wheat, barley, oats or rye, i.e. all cereals that undergo processes of fermentation).
