In Honor of Leap Day - The Day the Church Altered Time

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On the night of October 4, 1582, the citizens of Spain and its colonies, Portugal, Poland, and most of Italy went to bed and woke up 10 days later.

The peculiar event was not some medieval miracle but was, in fact, an effort by the Church to bring about a badly needed change to time. Having decreed months before that a reform of the calendar was essential for the good of Western civilization, Pope Gregory XIII (r. 1572–1585) implemented a new calendar on the night of October 4. The next day, part of the massive fix of the Julian calendar, was not counted as October 5 but October 15, 1582. The calendar reform proved one of the most important and impressive accomplishments for the progress of Europe in the whole of the Renaissance.

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Had the reform occurred a century before, of course, it would have been much easier to implement across all of what was then a united Christendom. As it was, in a post-Reformation Europe, the new computations were greeted with suspicion in the lands that were no longer Catholic. Protestant Germany adopted the calendar slowly. Prussia accepted it in 1610, while the rest of the Protestant states decreed it only in 1700.

The English, especially during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (r. 1558-1603), rejected any thought of adopting a calendar created under the name of a pope and remained long suspicious that this was some Catholic plot. Consequently, even as anti-Catholic bigots in the English Isles lampooned the popes as enemies of progress, they were 10 days behind everyone else in Western Europe for over 150 years. And after the leap year of 1700, they were 11 days behind. The English compounded the dating dilemma further by celebrating New Year not on January 1 but according to the older custom of March 25. As the American colonies adhered to the English system, they shared in the temporal displacement. Americans now celebrate the birth of George Washington on February 22, 1732, according to the Gregorian calendar. However, according to the English reckoning, he was born on February 11, 1731-32.

Acknowledging at last that the continued use of the Julian calendar and celebrating New Year on March 25 were “attended with divers inconveniences,” the British Parliament passed the Calendar (New Style) Act in 1750. The New Year would begin on January 1 rather than March 25 and time would be counted according to the Gregorian calendar. The act went into effect on September 2, 1752, and the next day was decreed as September 14, 1752.

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