Ash Wednesday

ASH WEDNESDAY. - In the last years of St. Gregory the Great, the Lenten fast began with the Wednesday preceding the First Sunday of Lent, which was therefore called caput ieiunii (v.) or also caput Quadragesimae. Penance at the beginning of Lent was impressed upon the faithful by the expulsion of public penitents by the bishop. The rite is preserved in the Roman Pontifical.

According to the rituals of the 7th century in Rome, on the morning of this day the penitents presented themselves to the priests deputed for this in the various titular churches, to whom they confessed their sins, if grave and public, and received from the hand of the penitentiary a garment of rough haircloth sprinkled with ashes, with the order to withdraw into some monastery to complete the imposed penance. Throughout the whole of Lent, until Holy Thursday, the day of reconciliation, they remained subject to various exercises of penance. With the disappearance of public penance, the clergy and the faithful on the Wednesday of the Ashes had ashes imposed on their heads as a sign of penance, a practice already observed in the Old Testament (Job 42:6; Judith 4:16; Jonah 3:6, etc.) and known also to the pagans. It was later prescribed by the Council of Benevento of 1091, can. 4. The ashes are taken from the branches of olive or palm blessed the previous year, and their blessing, already in use in the 10th century, makes of them a sacramental, so that the faithful, receiving them piously, may obtain the spirit of true penance. The prayers for their blessing go back to the 10th century (Ordo Romanus V). The chants are those of the penitential processions of this and other days of Lent. The imposition of ashes may also be practiced on the following Sunday, provided they were blessed on their own day, that is, the preceding Wednesday (cf. AAS, 20 [1924], p. 102). In the imposition of the ashes, the priest says, recalling the sentence of God pronounced upon Adam and upon all his descendants: "Remember, O man, that you are dust and to dust you shall return." Nothing could more forcefully signify our nothingness and the folly of human pride. The office of that day takes precedence over every other festive office, even of the first class. It was around the 11th century that in Rome the pope, the members of the clergy and the people on that day they first gathered in the titulus of St. Anastasia, and, once the imposition of the ashes had been performed there, to the singing of the litanies, in penitential garb and barefoot, they proceeded in procession to the basilica of St. Sabina on the Aventine, where, in the small cemetery of the atrium, the pope recited a prayer of absolution, while the choir sang the responsory Immuntemur (still in use today); then the Mass began. Of this rite there now remains the statio (v.) in that basilica.

Filippo Oppenheim