Reader Question: What Is an Ecclesiastical Province?
#spacer{clear:left}#abc #sidebar{margin-top:1.5em}if(zs>0){zSB(3,3)}else{gEI(“spacer”).style.display=’none’;gEI(“sidebar”).style.display=’none’}A reader writes: In “When Is Ascension 2009?” you write that “Ascension Thursday falls on May 21, 2009, and it will be celebrated on that day in the ecclesiastical provinces of Boston, Hartford, New York, Newark, Philadelphia, and the state of Nebraska.” But what is an ecclesiastical province? Is it the same as a diocese? I’m in a diocese that isn’t listed (the diocese of Pittsburgh), yet we’ve been told that Ascension will be celebrated on Thursday rather than on the following Sunday, like it is in many other places in the United States. That’s a very good question, and the reader is right to suspect that an ecclesiastical province and a diocese aren’t exactly the same. But what is an ecclesiastical province? Despite the bureaucratic-sounding name, an eccles
