OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Christians in the Holy Land are hoping to agree on joint date to celebrate Easter, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem said on Wednesday in his traditional Christmas address.

“We intend to unify the date of Easter,” Fuad Twal, the top Roman Catholic cleric in the Holy Land, told reporters in Jerusalem’s Old City.

He said the desire to celebrate on the same day the holiday marking the resurrection of Jesus was shared by the Catholics, the Protestants, the Eastern Orthodox and the Oriental churches as a demonstration of “commitment to unity”.

“We do so driven by the desire of our Lord and the unanimous will of the Christian people of the Holy Land,” he said.

But Twal warned it would be a “long process”.

“We have been waiting for 15 centuries; we can wait a little longer,” he said dryly.

In a tangible display of their division, Western and Eastern churches use different calendars to decide when Easter falls, meaning they very rarely coincide.

Protestants and Catholics use the Gregorian calendar to determine the date, while the Eastern Orthodox and Oriental churches use the Julian calendar.

Twal, who was born into a Bedouin Christian tribe in Jordan in 1940, and enthroned as the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem in 2009, also acknowledged feeling “a little anxious and concerned” about the ongoing turmoil in the Arab world.

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