Let's Talk in English by Manish Gupta

Author:Manish Gupta [Gupta, Manish]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789385890024
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2015-09-22T00:00:00+00:00

23

GIVE US BACK OUR ELEVEN DAYS!

Now that we have completed our discussion on all the months, let’s delve a little bit into the calendar year. Did you know that in the Men’s Military Rifle Shooting team event at the 1908 London Summer Games, although nine teams were entered, only eight competed? The ninth team was Russia, which never withdrew and actually tried to compete but missed the opportunity. Let us see how:

In 1908, as today, most nations in the world used the Gregorian calendar, but unlike today, a few nations used the older Julian calendar. Russia was one of these nations, and so their calendar differed by thirteen days from the Gregorian calendar. Russian shooters, thinking that the international team match was to begin on 10 July by the Julian calendar, arrived shortly before that date, which was actually 23 July by the Gregorian calendar. Unfortunately, they found that the international team match was over and all the shooters had left the Bisley Rifle Range.35

The reason for this difference between the Julian and Gregorian calendars is that the Julian calendar (promulgated by Julius Caesar) made the year too long by several minutes (365.25 days in a year versus 365.2422 days in reality), as it experienced three full days of displacement every 400 years (one day for every 131 years, to be precise). In 1582, it was out of sequence with the equinoxes and solstices by ten days. Thus, as the centuries passed, the Julian calendar became inaccurate. This was especially troubling to the Roman Catholic Church because it affected the determination of the date of Easter, which, by the sixteenth century, was well on its way to slipping from spring into summer. Several church councils had already discussed the problem but done nothing about it.

Pope Paul III recruited several astronomers, principally the Jesuit scientist Christopher Clavius (1537-1612), to come up with a solution. They built upon calendar reforms originally proposed by the astronomer and physician Aloysius Lilius (1510-1576). Unfortunately, Pope Paul III couldn’t finalize one from the several proposals he received. Pope Gregory XIII, long active in church affairs and a patron of education, was not one to let the matter continue indefinitely. He determined to correct the problem and when he was elected, out of the various proposals for calendar reform before him, he decided in favour of that of Clavius. On 24 February 1582, acting on the recommendations of a special council, he issued a papal bull* (a formal papal document of the Roman Catholic Church having a bulla, i.e. an official seal, attached), establishing what is now called the Gregorian calendar reform.

Although the papal commission, advised by Jesuit scientist Christopher Clavius, aided Pope Gregory XIII in making the reform, a similar plan had actually been propounded† by Bishop Robert Grosseteste of England 300 years earlier. This fact was not generally known, and resulted in an irony. The English, afraid of appearing to give too much deference to the Pope by adopting his calendar, rejected the Gregorian calendar

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