Happy February 29th!
I always wonder about the births today – when do you celebrate your birthday? On March 1st? On February 28th?
One of the best-known traditions about leap year is that women can propose marriage. Let’s set aside the fact that a non-leap year has never stopped anyone from proposing. Nevertheless, ladies, if you are proposing to your boyfriends today, you have a 16th century pope to thank for it!
On February 24, 1582 Pope Gregory XIII issued a papal bull named Inter gravissimas that instituted a new calendar that better aligned with the lunar calendar in order to celebrate Easter at the right time. Because the actual length of a year is a little bit longer that 365 days but not 366 days, that little piece of a day, over time, creates a shift in the systems used to measure years.
Different cultures in different time periods have accounted for the shift in various ways, sometimes adding extra days to a month, like we do today, or introducing a special month to account for the “lost” time. I’m amazed to learn that in the adoptions, countries switching to the new calendar lost as many as 10 days on their old calendar. Imagine going to bed on March 12th and waking up on March 22nd. If that happened today, I’d be pretty concerned about when I pay the mortgage.
In a nutshell, the introduction of the Gregorian calendar 434 years ago put the Roman Catholic Church in different countries in sync in order to celebrate Easter on the same day. But not everyone made the switch to this new calendar. At first it was only the predominantly Catholic European countries, most adopting it in the 16th shortly after the bull, but the rest of the world trickled along in a process that took about 300 years, more if you consider that countries such as Greece and Turkey didn’t adopt it until the 1920s. There was a great deal of opposition to the calendar – fears that it was a plot by the Church to take over the world. In the end, the adoption was probably driven by economics — everybody needed to be on the same page, so to speak.
Today many people don’t know the Catholic origins of this calendar that is widely adopted across the world, but there you have it.