ASH WEDNESDAY. – In the final years of St. Gregory the Great, the Lenten fast began with the Wednesday before the First Sunday of Lent, which was therefore called *caput ieiunii* (q.v.) or also *caput Quadragesimae*. The penitential observance at the beginning of Lent was impressed upon the faithful by the bishop’s expulsion of public penitents. 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 appointed for this duty in the various titular churches, to whom they confessed their sins if they were grave and public, and received from the penitentiary’s hand a garment of coarse haircloth sprinkled with ashes, with the order to retire to some monastery in order to fulfill 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 decline of public penance, the clergy and the faithful on Ash Wednesday began to have ashes imposed upon their heads as a sign of penance, a custom already practiced in the Old Testament (Job 42:6; Judith 4:16; Jonah 3:6, etc.) and known also among pagans. It was then prescribed by the Council of Benevento of 1091, canon 4. The ashes are taken from the branches of olive or palm blessed the previous year, and their blessing, already in use in the 2nd century, makes them a sacramental, so that the faithful, receiving them piously, may obtain the spirit of true penance. The prayers for their blessing date 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 can also be carried out on the following Sunday, provided they have been blessed on their proper day, namely the preceding Wednesday (cf. AAS, 20 [1924], p. 102). In the imposition of ashes, the priest, recalling the sentence of God pronounced upon Adam and upon all his descendants, says: *“Remember, O man, that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return.”* No more forceful way could be found to 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 about the 21st century that in Rome the pope, the members of the clergy, and the people gathered first at the titular church of St. Anastasia, and, after the imposition of ashes there, to the singing of the litanies, in penitential garb and barefoot, processed 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 *Immutemur* (still in use today); then the Mass began. Of this rite, the *statio* (q.v.) in that basilica remains.