Manage Account

Today is February 29—that extra day in February that turns every fourth year into a leap year.
Why do we have a leap day? Well, that question comes back to why we have a year at all. The seasons, the day, and the year are the primordial units of time, mentioned as part of the structure of creation in Genesis 1:14.
The Genesis writer doesn’t reflect on how those units of time come about and recur. He takes their repetition as a divine gift.
But our faith is not blind, ignoring reason. Not only did man experience the recurrence of those fixed times, but he eventually also asked why they recurred.
That led to man looking at the heavens, “the work of [God’s] hands” (Ps. 8:3), “declaring the glory of God” (19:1-2) not only in their magnificence, but also in their workings and order. The day was not just the daily commute of Helios across the sky, nor the seasons just some eternal cycle . . . because the year saw those “cycles” repeat themselves through advancing time.
That idea of time’s advance, not just its eternal recycling, is necessary to any concept of history. Without it, “all the world’s a stage” on which all men and women are reincarnated players, or . . . well, “life is hard, and then you die.” The Christian (and Jewish) concept of time rules out re-incarnation (an eternal return). But it does make possible the Incarnation—not just of Christ, but of every man, given freedom and a gift of time, to create (or fail to create) a unique work of art called love.
Eventually, those Jews and Christians also got to the how of the days, seasons, and years. The day is the product of rotation. The year is the product of revolution of the earth around the sun, while the seasons are how a particular piece of geography stands in relation on its earthly axis to the sun. The earth’s revolution from point A back to point A was taken as 365 and one quarter days, so, voilà: a quarter of a day every year added up to an extra day every four.
Alas, the earth’s revolution is not quite 365.25 days—i.e., 365 days and 6 hours. It’s 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 46 seconds—a little more than 11 minutes short of a quarter-day. That may not seem like much to man, whose life is “seventy years, or eighty for those who are strong” (Ps. 90:10), but over those seventy years, the calendar outruns the sun by about twelve hours—half a day.
Again, that might not seem like much. Julius Caesar started leap years in 45 B.C. By the time we get to Pope Gregory XIII, of Gregorian Calendar of 1582 fame, those 11 minutes per year had accumulated to 12.5 days. That meant the sun and the calendar were out of alignment by nearly two weeks, resulting in the sky saying “spring’ but the calendar “winter,” both facts relevant for <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/the-pope-vs-tradition">fixing Easter</a>. If you want proof of the problem, consider the dissonance between feasts like Easter and Christmas in the Catholic Church and those Orthodox churches (e.g., Russia’s) still clinging to the Julian Calendar, now about fifteen days out of solar alignment.
Pope Gregory XIII <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/the-day-the-church-altered-time">applied faith and reason</a> through a minor modification to the leap year rule. A leap year is any year evenly divisible by four. Gregory added a corollary: no centennial year can be a leap year unless it’s also divisible by 400. So 2000 was a leap year; 2100 will not be. That little trick will keep calendar and sun aligned for several thousand more years.
So faith, reason, and the calendar have a lot to do with leap year. But so does calendar “reform.”
As noted above, the day, seasons, and years are experienced as primordial units of time, connected to the sun, the “greater light to rule the day” (Gen. 1:16). The “week” is a bit less obvious. It more or less approximates half-phases of the moon, “the lesser light to govern the night.” But the week acquired its fixed dimensions in the Genesis 1 creation account as the unit of time marked by the recurrent “Lord’s Day” every seventh.
The year—365 or 366 days—is not evenly divisible by seven, one consequence of which is that dates are moveable in relation to days. February 28 was a Wednesday this year; it’ll be a Friday next year. That means calendars need to be changed annually. Afficionados of efficiency don’t like that.
There have been proposals to create something called a “perpetual calendar,” where particular dates would always fall on the same day. One version would start every quarter of the year (e.g., January, April, July, and October 1) on a Sunday, each quarter having ninety-one days. That gives 364 days. To keep day and date aligned, the 365th (and, every four years, 366th day) would be some sort of “universal” dates, days independent of the week. They would be dates, but they would not correspond to any week-days.
The “Appendix” to Vatican II’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy (Sacrosanctum Concilium) declares a willingness to accept a perpetual calendar, provided two conditions are honored: retention of the seven-day week and no dates outside the seven-day week.
The history of the calendar has been marked by conscious attempts to eliminate the week, primarily out of animus toward its religious origins. That was the driving force in both the French Revolutionaries’ and Bolsheviks’ calendars. The question today is whether Christians, for whom the distinctiveness of the “Lord’s Day” has withered, can withstand any organized push against creating a more “efficient” calendar not arranged by “non-inclusive” vestiges of once-dominant religions. In that regard, the protection of the seven weekdays of a seven-day week is important. It’s why we should thank God it’s Thursday . . . February 29!

The Lowdown on Leap Years

<div>When did celibacy become a discipline of the church? My Syrian Orthodox friend says it was "invented in the Middle Ages" and not biblical.</div><div>Jesus Christ, the great high priest of heaven (see Heb. 8:1-3), lived celibacy as a man and recommended celibacy for those who would serve him in the kingdom of God (Matt. 19:10-12). In addition, St. Paul, one of the earliest apostles, also extolled the virtues of celibacy, both for those devoted to serving the kingdom like himself and for Christians in general (1 Cor. 7:6, 32-40). So far from being invented in the Middle Ages, Christ exhorted the practice of celibacy in serving the kingdom and the early Church accordingly preached and practiced it.
Celibacy has long been allowed as a tradition in the East, of which the Syrian Orthodox and other Orthodox Churches have their ecclesiastical roots, though with certain provisions (e.g., no marriage after ordination and no married bishops). However, the Church’s <a href="http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cclergy/documents/rc_con_cclergy_doc_01011993_chisto_en.html">disciplinary actions at the ecumenical councils of Lateran I and Lateran II in the 1100s were reforming disciplines re: priestly celibacy, not innovative ones</a>.
For more on celibacy and the priesthood, see <a href="http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cclergy/documents/rc_con_cclergy_doc_01011993_chisto_en.html">this historical overview posted on the Vatican website</a>, <a href="https://www.catholic.com/tract/celibacy-and-the-priesthood">our Catholic Answers tract</a> and <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/how-to-argue-for-priestly-celibacy">this article by Jason Evert</a>.
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Was Priestly Celibacy “Invented in the Middle Ages?”

<div>Can the Annunciation be moved to a permanent date out of the shadow of Divine Mercy Sunday?</div><div>The date of the Feast of the Annunciation is March 25. In 2018 March 25 was Palm Sunday and then Holy Week, and the Octave of Easter took precedence over the feast, and so it was moved to April 9.
You might also recall that the feast was moved in 2016 because Good Friday fell on March 25.
While this happens occasionally, the feast usually is able to remain on March 25. Over the next twelve years the feast will need to be moved only three times (in 2024, 2027, and 2029).
In the Latin Church, it has been almost always and universally celebrated on March 25, with evidence going back the seventh century.
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Maybe you&#8217;ve heard the claims that Christmas is on December 25th because of some pagan festival: either Saturanlia, or Sol Invictus, or the birthday of Mithras, or some such. But is that really true? Joe unpacks the lies and falsehood spread by the &#8220;Living Church of God&#8221; in their video &#8220;Christmas Is Pagan—Here&#8217;s Why It Matters &amp; What You Should Do About It.&#8221;

Christmas Is Pagan Rebutted

In this thought-provoking clip, Cy Kellett engages with Catholic apologist Jimmy Akin as they tackle a challenging question about the morality of sacrificing a child to God, drawing parallels to the story of Abraham. Jimmy skillfully navigates the complexities of this inquiry, highlighting the horror of such an act while encouraging deeper reflection on the nature of faith and morality. Join them as they explore this sensitive topic with clarity and insight.
Transcript:
Cy: Should I kill my child as a sacrifice to God? If God will ask me to do that, like he asked Abraham. This is a question I once got from an atheist, and I never found a good answer.
Jimmy: So there are a number of ways we could approach this question, and it&#8217;s basically being used. It&#8217;s probably not a sincere question coming from the atheist. It&#8217;s probably being used as an attack on Christianity and Judaism.
And one way of dealing with it, which is not actually the answer I&#8217;m going to propose, but one way of dealing with it would be to turn the situation around on the atheist. This could be useful for purposes of helping the atheist think a little more broadly, because the idea of killing your child is utterly horrific to us.
And frankly, it would have been utterly horrific to Jewish people in the Old Testament too. So that&#8217;s really what&#8217;s given this objection its force: the intuition that we have today that killing a child, especially your own, is utterly horrific. And I&#8217;m not saying it&#8217;s not. It is.
But it could be useful to help the atheist think a little more broadly. By saying so, can you imagine any situations where you might undertake action that would lead to the death of your child?
Let&#8217;s suppose that your child has a horrible, incurable, lingering disease that is causing your child to have enormous pain. Well, there are various people today, and actually I oppose these people, but there are people today who would say if this child is in just enormous unending agony, then they should be put out of their misery.
And there would be people who would advocate euthanasia for such a child. Those people tend to be common, or at least more common among atheists. So I think it could be helpful to say to the atheist, you know, could you imagine euthanasia in that kind of situation?
Now, I believe euthanasia is immoral, but the atheist may not. And that may help open the atheist&#8217;s eyes. What would not be immoral in my view is palliative care, where you give pain-relieving drugs to the child, even knowing that taking those pain-relieving drugs may hasten their death.
But you&#8217;re not actively trying to kill them; you&#8217;re trying to relieve their pain. The same thing applies at the other end of life with older people. They can take pain-relieving drugs even though it may hasten their death, as long as they&#8217;re not directly causing the death. What you&#8217;re trying to do is just relieve the person&#8217;s pain.
So palliative care is different than euthanasia, but with euthanasia, there are many atheists who don&#8217;t have a problem with it. And so you can then say, well, okay, so what if it turns out that God is real and your child is in this circumstance, and God tells you, &#8220;Hey, your child is in enormous pain and is going to remain in enormous pain. You should just go ahead and use euthanasia.&#8221; Would you obey God then?
A lot of atheists at that point might say, yeah, if God really spoke to me and told me that this is the best thing for my child, I would do it. I&#8217;d be surprised to get a phone call from God like that. But, you know, if this were the circumstance, I could see doing this.
Okay, now that&#8217;s not how I would approach the situation, but this could help open the mind of the atheist to thinking about this a little more broadly instead of just leaping to condemn Judaism and Christianity.
So now let me step back and answer the question from a Jewish Christian perspective. There have been two general approaches to answering this type of question, and it doesn&#8217;t just apply to this; it applies to other things too.
But the two positions are divided based on the question: Is taking innocent human life an intrinsic evil, meaning it&#8217;s always wrong? One school of thought, represented for example by St. Thomas Aquinas, says no, taking innocent human life is not always wrong.
All life is a gift from God, so it&#8217;s up to God to determine how much of that gift we receive. It&#8217;s also up to him to determine the circumstances by which life ends. So if God tells us in a particular case to take life, it&#8217;s legitimate to do that.
He&#8217;s just saying, okay, this person&#8217;s got this much of the gift; now&#8217;s their time to die. I&#8217;ve chosen you to be the means through which they die. So go ahead and kill this innocent person.
That&#8217;s how Aquinas and various other thinkers in Christian history would look at the sacrifice of Isaac. They would say that God really did tell Abraham to do this. It wasn&#8217;t ultimately God&#8217;s will that he go through with it, but it was morally legitimate for Abraham to receive this instruction from God and act on the assumption that he is going to go through with it.
Now, the author of the Book of Hebrews notes that, because he didn&#8217;t say this explicitly, but he notes that in this event, he says Abraham considered God able to raise the dead. That&#8217;s presumably based on the inference that God had promised that Abraham&#8217;s seed would be reckoned through Isaac, and Isaac hadn&#8217;t had any kids yet.
So if God&#8217;s gonna fulfill his promise to Abraham and Abraham kills Isaac under God&#8217;s instruction, well, then God must be gonna raise Isaac from the dead, so he&#8217;s not gonna be permanently dead. He&#8217;ll be able to continue to go on and have descendants through which Abraham&#8217;s line will be reckoned.
So that also changes the moral complexity of the situation, if that&#8217;s the kind of thing that Abraham was envisioning.
So that&#8217;s school number one of how to approach this: that taking innocent life is not always wrong. If God really tells you that he&#8217;s determined that the person is to receive this much of the gift of life and so forth, the other school would say no, taking an innocent human life is always wrong.
Therefore, this passage is not to be taken in the straightforward historical way that the first school takes it. Instead, it&#8217;s teaching us a lesson.
So what lesson? One or more lessons? What lessons would this story be teaching us? Well, number one, it&#8217;s teaching us that God was willing. I&#8217;m sorry, that Abraham was willing to be very faithful to God, even at personal cost. Okay, that&#8217;s a good thing.
But what else is it teaching us? That God does not want child sacrifice? Because there were ancient Near Easterners who, like, burned their children to Moloch and so forth. They were even doing that in. Even though it would be horrifying to many Israelites, there were some that actually did it.
There was a place in the Valley of Hinnom, right next to the temple in Jerusalem called the Tophet. At the Tophet, they would do child sacrifice. Because there was this presence in Israel at the time of child sacrificers, a clear message needed to be sent that this is not what God wants.
So how can you convey that message? Well, one way would be taking the patriarch of all of us, Abraham, and showing him in a situation where God rejects this. That&#8217;s the actual interpretation that I would take of the passage. I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s meant as a straightforward historical account.
I think it&#8217;s meant to teach us that faithfulness is good, but don&#8217;t let that turn into child sacrifice. God will provide something else.
Cy: Marcin, thank you very much. I hope that that was a helpful answer to you. I do appreciate the question. Lots more questions to get to.

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