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This is very interesting. My understanding is that Easter and the Jewish passover are intertwined so it makes sense that once the date for Easter was fixed, Lent would spring up (pun intended).

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So are you associating Passover with Lent? I’m not grasping what you’re trying to say (except the pun - I understood that and hated it)

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Good. What I'm saying is that in my head I was wonder if Easter came.before Lent, and I'm 90% positive it did. And then it took time for Ash Wednesday to become a thing.

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Oh, yes! You’re absolutely right. Easter was the first development of the Liturgical calendar, followed (roughly) by Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, and Advent.

Of course, I once wrote in a note that anytime we look at the liturgical calendar we should recall that the earliest Christians sanctified the week before the year; it was far more important that Sunday was the first and eighth day of the week than which Sunday in the year it was.

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That makes a lot of sense: reconciling what Jesus said about fasting and the practice of ashes had bugged me for a minute. Not that it stopped me from converting, mind you; it was something I figured I could look up or study more about later. :)

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I’m sure the Biblical scholars could give you even more!

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Imagine my surprise when I arrived in Milan last week and found out that (1j they don’t have Ash Wednesday in Milan and (2) their Carnival lasts till Saturday and they launch into Lent on the first Sunday of Lent. The reason is that they follow the Ambrosian Rite in Milan. It is older than the Latin Rite. St. Ambrose was the famous bishop of Milan who instructed St. Augustine and baptized him.

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