Who Put the Ashes in Ash Wednesday?
Ash Wednesday is the one day of the year when we can see if the strangers we meet in street and store are Catholic—at least we can see who went to Mass to get their Lent started. While the black ashes clearly mark the brows of the baptized, it isn’t clear to most of those baptized and ashed who it was that began this grim yet gritty liturgical tradition recalling “the way to dusty death,” as Macbeth put it.
The first man to smear Lenten ashes on the foreheads of the faithful did so not only as a reminder that we are dust and to dust we must return, but also to proclaim that it is from the ashes that we will rise again. It was one who was no stranger to suffering, service, and the struggle over crumbling culture and lost souls—and with the steely determination to do something about it with prayer and penance. The ashes of Ash Wednesday come to us from no less a personage than Pope St. Gregory the Great.
In 601, three years before he died at 64, Pope Gregory set the day for the beginning of Lent as 46 days before Easter. His reasoning was to establish 40 days of fasting while including six feast days on the Sundays—for in Gregory’s words, “Who bends the knee on Sunday denies God to have risen.” This was when a Wednesday became the beginning of Lent, and Pope Gregory marked that Wednesday by marking his flock with ashes in the form of a cross, according to the ancient pagan and biblical tradition denoting mourning.
Ash Wednesday is a perfect icon of Pope Gregory’s totally down-to-business and somewhat down-in-the-mouth Catholicism. In his own day, fourteen hundred years ago, Gregory was convinced he was living in
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LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
