Ash Wednesday ushers in Lenten season

The Catholic Church marks the beginning of the Lenten season today with the placing of ashes on the foreheads of the faithful.

By tradition, the ashes to be used in today’s Ash Wednesday ritual are made from the palaspas (palm fronds) used in the previous year’s Domingo de Ramos or Palm Sunday.

In a Lenten message, Manila Archbishop Gaudencio Rosales said Catholic Filipinos should prepare to enter the holy season "in the spirit of prayer and generosity to take on sacrifice and the discipline of self."

The 40 days of Lent, Rosales said, are as sacred to Christians as the Ramadan is to Muslims.

"For some, sacrifice begins slowly as an attitude of the heart, and then as a willingness to do better, or just yielding to the prompting to give a little bit more for the cause of the poor. For very many of our brothers and sisters life is already a sacrifice," he said.

Under the supervision of priests, the palaspas are burned and the residue is mixed with water. The paste is then blessed three times with holy water and incense.

The ashes remind us of the Christian view of mortality. Uttering a variation of the biblical passage "From dust you came, and to dust you shall return," a priest dabs the ashes on the forehead of the faithful in the sign of the cross.

The ritual also highlights the need for the faithful to make reparations for their sins.

In the early days of the Catholic Church, a bishop would require people guilty of serious sins to wear sackcloth and ashes at the beginning of Lent. The sinners would go in cinere et cilicio (sackcloth and ashes) for 40 days while they waited for sacramental reconciliation on Maundy Thursday.

In 1901, at the Council of Beneventum, Pope Urban VI extended what has become known as the "imposition of ashes" to all the faithful.

For many modern Catholics and some Christians of other denominations, Ash Wednesday, while no longer the austere holy day it once was, still ushers in a period of prayer and fasting in preparation for the joy and rebirth of Easter.

Citing the Book of Isaiah, Rosales said that beyond fasting as a self-inflicted pain, "God looks at freeing the oppressed, sharing one’s food with the hungry, sheltering the homeless as the special forms of fasting and sacrifice."

"We can still find prayer in the Church, in our hearts, in the moments of quiet, in the Sacrament, in the Eucharist, in reading or singing of the Pasyon ng Panginoon," he said.

And just as Jesus Christ went to the desert for 40 days and nights to pray, fast and face temptation, so, too, is this Lenten season meant for Christians to perform their spiritual exercises, the archbishop said.