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According to John, Christ died on the cross at the exact moment when in the temples nearby, the lambs were being slaughtered for the Pascal feast. His death coincides with the sacrifice of the lambs. That however means that he died on the eve of Passover ... Most of the exegetes were of the opinion that John did not want to give us the exact, historic date of Christ’s death, but had instead chose a symbolic date to highlight the one profound truth: Jesus is the true Lamb of God who shed his blood for us.
- HH Pope Benedict XVI, sermon, 5 April 2007, Holy Thursday
Sources - Asia News; Annunciations; Whispers in the Loggia [full sermon text]; Young Fogeys
Fr Jay Toborowsky comments on his Young Fogeys blog:
But something else in that Holy Thursday homily knocked me out, which I heard for the first time ever. There's always been a battle over whether the Last Supper took place on Passover night or the day before. ... Scholars tell us that, since Passover was always on a fixed date, there were times when it fell on the Sabbath, and then came the dilemma of which of God's mandated feasts do you keep (since one involves heavy work and one requires no work be done)? So in his homily, B16 tells of scholarly research that says that the people of Qumran (where the Dead Sea scrolls were found) would, in the case of the Passover and Sabbath collision, have their seders the day before, with all the froo-froo, but intentionally without a passover lamb. The implications of Jesus and the 12 apostles having such a seder are interesting. With no lamb on the their table, Jesus himself is the Lamb at that seder (adding a whole new profound depth to his command to eat his body and drink his blood).
I've been waiting years to hear this most logical 14 Nisan crucifixion timing from a Catholic priest. And now I hear it from the pope himself. I always get given the 15 Nisan story. The explanation above goes a long way to explain why the Wednesday crucifixion theory of Herbert Armstrong is wrong, so ironically it was Herbert Armstrong who was adamant that Jesus died on 14 Nisan.
That is the obvious time for Jesus to have died. After all, Jesus death wasn't timed to coincide with the killing of the lambs, nor was it meant to be approximate; the Passover lamb sacrifice foreshadowed Jesus' death, and its original timing was designed to coincide with Jesus' death.