The calendar of religious holidays

For the calendar of religious holidays and periods, see Liturgical year. For this year's Gregorian calendar, see Leap year starting on Sunday.

The Gregorian reform contained two parts: a reform of the Julian calendar as used prior to Pope Gregory's time and a reform of the lunar cycle used by the Church, with the Julian calendar, to calculate the date of Easter. The reform was a modification of a proposal made by the Calabrian doctor Aloysius Lilius (or Lilio).[5] Lilius's proposal included reducing the number of leap years in four centuries from 100 to 97, by making 3 out of 4 centurial years common instead of leap years: this part of the proposal had been suggested before by, among others, Pietro Pitati. Lilio also produced an original and practical scheme for adjusting the epacts of the moon when calculating the annual date of Easter, solving a long-standing obstacle to calendar reform.

The Gregorian calendar, also called the Western calendar and the Christian calendar, is internationally the most widely accepted civil calendar.[1][2][3] It was introduced by Pope Gregory XIII, after whom the calendar was named, by a decree signed on 24 February 1582; the decree, a papal bull, is known by its opening words, Inter gravissimas.[4] The Gregorian calendar was adopted later that year by a handful of countries, with other countries adopting it over the following centuries.

The motivation for the Gregorian reform was that the Julian calendar assumes that the time between vernal equinoxes is 365.25 days, when in fact it is presently almost 11 minutes shorter. The discrepancy results in a drift of about three days every 400 years. At the time of Gregory's reform there had already been a drift of 10 days since Roman times, resulting in the spring equinox falling on 11 March instead of the ecclesiastically fixed date of 21 March, and moving steadily earlier in the Julian calendar. Because the spring equinox was tied to the celebration of Easter, the Roman Catholic Church considered this steady movement in the date of the equinox undesirable.