(RNS) Let’s be clear: April Fools’ Day does, trace its origins to a pope.

The day began, most believe, in 1582, when Pope Gregory XIII decreed the adoption of the “Gregorian calendar” — named after himself — which moved New Year’s Day from the end of March to Jan. 1.

Some argue that April Fools’ Day is a remnant of early “renewal festivals,” which typically marked the end of winter and the start of spring.

These festivals, according to the Museum of Hoaxes, typically involved “ritualized forms of mayhem and misrule.”

Participants donned disguises, played tricks on friends as well as strangers, and perverted the social order.

“Servants might get to order around masters, or children challenge and disobey the authority of parents and teachers,” the museum’s website notes. “However, the disorder is always bounded within a strict time frame, and tensions are defused with laughter and comedy. 

The moral social order was symbolically challenged and put out of order during the celebration of April of fools. 

All this nonsense and stupidity which was practiced on the 1st of April fool’s day, was done for the sake of marking the end of winter and welcoming of Spring time.

For centuries, this feast was seen as “a disorderly, even transgressive Christian festival. 

The reveling clergy who was elected as a burlesque Lord of Misrule, his duty was to fulfill the act of wearing animal masks, women’s clothes, and to command the people to do every perverted profanity.

He sang obscene songs, swung censers that gave off foul-smelling smoke, played dice at the altar, and otherwise parodied the liturgy of the church,” says historian Max Harris, author of “Sacred Folly: 

A New History of the Feast of Fools.” Afterward, revelers would “take to the streets, howling, issuing mock indulgences, hurling manure at bystanders, and staging scurrilous plays.”

In the Catholic Encyclopedia, the “feast of fools” is linked to the pagan celebration of Saturnalia.