Why Catholics Love Ash Wednesday

[Mary C. Weaver]

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Why Catholics Love Ash Wednesday

Once again today, Mass was packed: every Mass, every pew without exception, from morning until night.



Catholics love Ash Wednesday. Priests often comment on how peculiar it is. It is not a holy day of obligation. Catholics could stay at home and luxuriate, stay at the office and work, avoid the traffic, avoid the fight for a parking place.



Instead they come. They come to receive ashes on their heads, and be marked as Catholics, a sign observed by everyone inside and outside the Church. And it isn’t exactly flattering to walk back into the office with a smudge on the forehaded. One walks around all day having to explain the meaning and where one has been.



Attending Mass on Ash Wednesday it isn’t a law in the world or in the Church. There is no penalty for failing to be there. And yet they come anyway.



Why?



It has something to do with the mark, the very physical evidence of the ceremony. The faith isn’t an abstraction in this case. It is instantiated in something we can see. It is not just an idea. It is a thing perceived by the senses. It is unlike anything we experience in the rest of the world: it is a mark of the sacred.



In some ways, in the sweep of history, this is an especially Catholic impulse, one that takes seriously the Incarnation as an empirical fact. That God would become man and take on human form in every way affirms as facet of our faith that the senses are not evil as the Manicheans would have it but rather a part of the created order that can made sacred through holy uses in holy spaces.



I’ve read various atheist tracts over the years that rail against every variety of religion and poke fun at the gods we are accused of inventing in order to quiet our insecurities. In these, Catholic Christianity is usually lumped in with all the others and dismissed as a sheer fantasy. But these writers are wrong in this sense: Catholicism is distinct for being a faith that is fundamental based on a series of physical facts perceived by the senses. Christ existed. He made certain claims for himself. These claims were heard. For these claims, he suffered and died.



If these facts are wrong, Catholicism is not true. But they are not wrong, and on these truths about what happened in time, in the physical world, form the foundation of our doctrine. The Incarnation is everything for us.



It is for the same reason that Catholics do not fear ico...

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