Binyamin Dissen is of course quite right.
Pesach is, and appears always to have been, a seven-day holiday; and it is not
clear to me that the six days following its first day are any less constrained
calendrically than the first one.
A recent development, circa 2009, is that the Catholic Church no longer takes
the view that the celebration of Pesach and Easter on the same day should be
avoided. This doctrinal shift was long overdue: The names of Easter in the
romance languages, Pâques, Pasqua, etc., were hijacked from Pesach. (In
English we have only an adjective, as in Paschal lamb.)
Had the Church taken this view earlier the rules for calculating the dates of
Easter in the Gregorian calendar would have been much simpler. Much Jesuit
ingenuity was devoted to ensuring that this coincidence (old sense) would be
rare, but it was not made impossible.
John Gilmore Ashland, MA 01721-1817 USA
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