When the pope (maybe) invented April Fool's Day
Also: The death of the pope who held the first solemn canonization ceremony in Church history
996 A.D.
Before we get to the invention of April Fool’s Day, we first need to pay homage to the only pontiff to have died on this particular day of the year.
Pope John XV served as Bishop of Rome for a decade at the end of the 10th Century, one of the most fraught and, frankly, dark periods of the papacy the Catholic Church has ever seen.
Not much of John’s reign was remarkable as far as history is concerned – he was relegated to little more than spiritual governance due to the dictatorial Roman government of the time – but there is one act in particular that echoes down even to our own day.
On January 31, 993, Pope John XV declared Bishop Ulrich of Augsburg to be a saint in a solemn ceremony, which was recorded in a papal bull to the French and German bishops days later on February 3. It was the first time in history that sainthood had been conferred by an official papal decree, beyond simply the popular acclamation of sanctity that had been in vogue for the prior (almost) 10 centuries.
1582 A.D.
Today in Papal History also marks a reminder of the most popular theory for how April Fool’s Day got its start.
1582 was the year that Pope Gregory XIII instituted what we now know as the Gregorian Calendar – aka the calendar that functionally every soul on earth adheres to.
Now, to make the connection between a world-changing calendar shift and the day that everyone pulls on over on their neighbor, some context:
The Catholic Church has always been incredibly particular about the dating of Easter each year, namely that it always be placed on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Spring equinox.
Here’s why that’s was a problem, according to EWTN’s Matthew Bunson:
The problem has always been the fact that a year cannot contain neatly organized days or months. Put simply, the interval between successive [Spring] equinoxes (every 365.2424 days) is approximately eleven minutes less than 365 and one quarter days. At the same time, the synodic period of the moon (i.e., the time between each full moon or new moon) is around twenty-nine and a half days, so that twelve months add up to only about 354 days. A calendar that incorporates the movements of both the sun and the moon thus becomes quite a challenge, and people of many civilizations have certainly given it their best shot.
The best and most ubiquitous calendar up to the reign of Pope Gregory XIII had been the Julian Calendar, instituted by Julius Caesar in 46 B.C. To its credit, that calendar was largely unchanged and included many things still recognizable to us today: the 12 months of the year, Leap Years, and an extra day in February in every 4th year.
However, the Julian Calendar was still rudimentary and imprecise in nature in that it simply accounted for 365.25 days, period – without regard for that pesky 11 minutes and 14 seconds that it overshot the actual timing of the Earth’s full encirclement of the sun.
As a result, like a clock that runs too fast, the timing of the Spring and Fall equinoxes fell backward by one full day every 130 years.
And that means, by the year 1500, the equinox had shift by TEN WHOLE DAYS.
Sparing the rest of the story, what ultimately took place was one big calendar shift that not only eliminated October 5-14, 1582 from ever occurring, but ALSO moved the day of the “New Year” to January 1 instead of the end of March.
Given the little wrinkle that the Protestant Reformation unseated Catholicism in several European countries by that time, the new calendar wasn’t adopted for large swaths of the population for quite a while afterward.
And so, as the story goes, those who failed to get the message were called fools, and – at least in France, even to this day – would have paper fish or ‘poisson d’avril’ (April fish) attached to their backs, symbolizing an easily-caught fish and a gullible person.
