05 — 1923 and After

The Pan-Orthodox Congress convened by Meletios IV (Metaxakis) at Constantinople in May and June 1923 proposed the Revised Julian calendar. This section reports what the Congress was, who attended and who did not, what else it proposed, and what canonical weight its decisions carry — and then sets out Milanković’s scheme, its adoption church by church, and the one concrete liturgical defect the resulting arrangement produces.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Contents

File Description
the-congress-of-1923-and-what-it-proposed.md 10 May – 8 June 1923; who was represented and the absence of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem; the whole reform package, including the proposals on clerical marriage that no church received; the objections raised in the room; its canonical standing stated without exaggeration; and a sober note on Meletios
the-revised-julian-calendar-and-its-reception.md Milanković’s leap rule and why it is more accurate than the Gregorian; the deliberate decision not to touch the Paschalion; adoption from 1924 to 1968 and the Polish reversal of 2014; and the Apostles’ Fast anomaly with worked examples from 2013, 2024, and 2025

What This Section Is Careful About

The 1923 Congress attracts overstatement from both directions, and this section resists both.

It was not an Ecumenical Council — and it never claimed to be, so announcing the fact refutes nobody. It was not a properly constituted pan-Orthodox synod either, since three of the four ancient patriarchates were absent and the Russian Church was under arrest. Its authority was contested from the week it rose. But the churches that adopted the calendar did so by their own synodal acts, not on the Congress’s authority, so the case against the New Calendar cannot be won merely by discrediting the Congress.

Equally, the Congress showed real restraint: it had before it a proposal to compute Pascha astronomically and declined it, leaving the Paschalion untouched. That was the right judgment and this collection says so.

The Anomaly

The mixed arrangement pairs a Gregorian-aligned fixed calendar with the Julian Paschalion. The Apostles’ Fast begins fifty-seven days after Pascha and ends on 28 June. Move the fixed end thirteen days earlier and leave the start alone, and the fast is thirteen days shorter every year — and vanishes entirely whenever Pascha falls after 2 May, as it did in 2013 and 2024.

That is the strongest technical argument in section 06, and the evidence for it is assembled here.

Reading Order

Read the two files in order; the second depends on the first.

See Also