The archbishop of Canterbury has announced he is engaged in an ambitious plan to solve one of the oldest disagreements in Christianity – one dating back more than 1,600 years.

Justin Welby said he had been in discussions with Catholic representatives and the world’s other major Christian denominations to agree on a fixed day for Easter, at the end of a four-day meeting of Anglican primates whose meeting had been dominated by discord over gay rights.

The archbishop said he had warned ministers that the change could have an effect on school terms and calendars, saying he hoped the unified date on the second or third Sunday in April could be introduced in the next five to 10 years. He added: “I would love to see it before I retire.”

The rules for determining the date of Easter were set in AD325 at the council of Nicaea, which was convened by the Roman emperor Constantine to codify the Christian faith. It declared that Easter should come on the first Sunday after the 14th day of the Paschal – or ecclesiastical – full moon, meaning that it falls between 22 March 22 and 25 April where the Gregorian calendar is used.

However, the dates set by various different parts of the Christian church have drifted apart in the 1,690 years since then, as different calendars are used. Orthodox churches usually celebrate Easter a week after.

Attempts to reach an agreement over the date of Easter goes back to at least the 10th century, “so it may take a little while”, Welby told journalists.

Pope Francis last year signalled an openness to changing the date of Easter in the west so that Christians could celebrate it on the same day around the world. The discussions now involve representatives of Francis, the Coptic pope and the ecumenical patriarch of the Orthodox church.

In the UK, a legal foundation for changing the date of Easter has existed since the Easter Act 1928, which proposed setting it for the Sunday following the second Saturday in April. However, the act has never been implemented, and successive governments have left it to churches to agree any such change.



Welby took journalists by surprise at a press conference when he said that Easter had come up in primates’ discussions following a meeting he had with the Coptic Pope Tawadros II in Cairo, and discussions Tawadros had with Francis and the Ecumenical Patriarch.

“Pope Tawadros has put forward the idea to churches in the eastern tradition and the western tradition that it be fixed somewhere around the second or third sunday of April and we will certainly be joining in. We have agreed that we support that,” Welby said.