Let's start with the Carnival, which as most people know is a mobile party that is embedded between the months of February and March. Its origin dates back to antiquity, and as it was generally done with feasts of a pagan nature, it was given a Christian touch, to disguise a little the excesses that were incurred. That touch was on Ash Wednesday, date on which the faithful had to go to the temple to be warned that they were open to conversion.
The Catholic Church, which is not all Christians, has tried to impose the date of the birth of Christ based on the contributions of the Gospels. Notice that we are talking about the lunar calendar, and the church has always been faithful to it, regardless of the advances of science. To fix the date of the carnival, we must first do it with the Holy Week, which is celebrated 40 days after Ash Wednesday. Carnival is celebrated before that day, so it must be Monday and Tuesday, nothing more.
Not all Christian churches have the same calendar of festivities, but the Catholic Church estimates that the time that goes from Ash Wednesday to Holy Thursday and that is characterized as supposedly a period of penance, is what is called Lent.
I say supposedly, because in that period, to begin with, the dazzling carnival octavites are celebrated, competing with them in carnal excesses, drunkenness and other linduras.
Now, the date of Holy Week is fixed by the day on which it is celebrated on Easter Sunday (also called Easter Day), whose advent occurs on the Sunday following the first full moon of the month of Nisan, which in accordance The Jewish calendar corresponds to the period of March 22 and April 25. Are we going well here?
So they understand: Resurrection Sunday is the one that takes place after the first full moon of spring. We have to warn those who live in the tropics, that spring is a cool season, very beautiful. But, if you live in the southern hemisphere of the planet, where most of the world's poor live, it would be the first full autumn moon. Do not make illusions. Is it clear?
A man named Dionysius, who by his short stature is known as The Meager, deduced that, to fix the dates of the birth and death of Jesus and in view of the MANY years passed since the fall of the Roman Empire, that the years were counted from the first of January following the birth of Christ "Thanks to his writings and subsequent studies was accepted on Friday April 7 as the day on which Christ died: the first Holy Friday in history!
To keep the story simple, we will say that Dionysus himself, despite being a great scholar, did not establish Year Zero, because in cultured Europe this figure was not known, which thanks to the Arabs we use it at our pleasure today. Another incoherence: Christ was born 6 years before Christ, that is, Dionysius was wrong.
Then we have the date of Resurrection Sunday. It should take 40 days from Ash Wednesday, until it culminates on Palm Sunday, which precedes Resurrection. Why 40 days? Because Christ withdrew that same amount of days to the desert, which coincides with the same number that Moses reached in the same place; for the number of days the flood lasted and for the 40 years that the crossing of the Jewish people lasted, always through the desert
. Catholics are therefore called to reflect during these periods.
