Let's go to Florida now. Talk to Linda.

I had a question about the Easter celebration after the first full moon as an example of Christianity or Catholic Church ties to early paganism.

I need to defend that.

Somebody pose that question to me, and I want to be able to answer it correctly.

Okay, so Easter is reckoned in the Western Church.

It's reckoned differently in the Greek Orthodox churches,

or the other Orthodox churches, I should say.

So it's the first Sunday after the first full moon of after the vernal equinox.

So when the vernal equinox takes place, then it's followed shortly thereafter by the full moon.

So the Sunday following that is the date that Easter celebrated.

Now there was in the early church something called a

quarto decimon controversy that had to do with when do you celebrate Easter. And this is why

even today, the church is in the east, they don't celebrate Easter the same time we do. And in a way,

that's almost beside the point. But drawing upon two main things. Number one is the

change of the calendar and the way in which the lunar calendar, which the Jews followed, and to some

extent still follow, was not an accurate calendar in terms of you would lose minutes and days. This is

why we have leap years. This is why we have leap years.

This is why we follow the solar calendar,

and that's been updated a few times in history.

But that's where the Catholic custom comes from.

And the Jews, of course, were not pagan,

and they followed the lunar calendar.

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