The Christian faith follows the Gregorian calendar which follows the solar reckoning. The year has 365 days in a regular year, and 366 in a leap year, which falls every fourth year. The Gregorian calendar excludes the century years (1400 , 1500 and so on) from being leap years. However, if the century year is divisible by 400 (1600,2000), then it becomes a leap year. Every 1500 years, an extra day is added to February. There are 12 months in a year. The months have 30, 31 or 28 (29 in a leap year) days.
There are 7 days in a week and the week begins with Sunday. Sunday is also one of the most important days for the Christians. A special mass is organised in churches on Sunday which all Catholics must attend.
The Gregorian calendar is the corrected form of the Julian calendar.The Julian calendar was introduced by Julius Caesar in 46 BC. The olde stsystem of reckoning was lunar in which the months and days were decided upon by the shape and position of the moon. In the first century BC, the Roman Empire opposed the lunar calendar. In 46 BC, Julius Caesar, with the aid of the Alexandrian astronomer Sosigenes, calculated the famous Julian calendar, which completely ignored the motion of the moon. In addition, the mean year was taken at the value current in Egypt, 365 days 6 hours. Each month was given a fixed number of days, with the single exception of February, which received 28 days in ordinary years, and 29 every fourth year.
Though a 30-day month alternates with a 31-day month, July and August do not follow this rule. If they did, August should be 30 days as against the present 31. A very interesting Roman legend explains this anomaly.
July was originally the fifth month of the Roman year. After the calendar reformation by Julius Caesar, it became the seventh month and was named July after the emperor, because it was the month in which he was born. The new name came into use in 44BC, the year of Caesar`s death. When Gaius Julius Caesar Octaviaus, Julius Caesar`s nephew, came into power, he was titled August us meaning venerable` or revered`. And as July had been named for his uncle, Augustus decided that a month should bear his name too. Although he was born in September, he chose the month following July and decreed that it should be called August, because it was then that he had been admitted to the Consulate, ended all civil wars and conquered Egypt. To indicate that he was as important as his uncle, he decreed that his month should also have 31 days.
In the second century however, the Julian calendar also proved to have some shortcomings, due to which the dates of the vernal equinoxes shifted by 10 days. In consequence, a new calendar was issued in the year 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII. Ten days were omitted at once so as to restore the vernal equinox to the date which it had previously occupied; and the mean length of the calendar year was fixed at 365 days, 5 hours and 49.2 minutes.