The Wednesday after Quinquagesima Sunday, which is
the first day of the Lenten fast
The name dies cinerum (day of ashes)
which it bears in the Roman Missal is
found in the earliest existing copies of
the Gregorian Sacramentary and
probably dates from at least the eighth
century. On this day all the faithful,
according to ancient custom, are
exhorted to approach the altar before
the beginning of Mass, and there the priest, dipping his
thumb into ashes previously blessed, marks the forehead,
or in case of clerics upon the place of the tonsure – of each
the sign of the cross, saying the words: “Remember, you
are dust, and to dust you will return”. or “Turn away from
sin and be faithful to the Gospel.” The ashes used in this
ceremony are made by burning the remains of the palms
blessed on the Palm Sunday of the previous year. In the
blessing of the ashes four prayers are used, all of them
ancient. The ashes are sprinkled with holy water and
fumigated with incense. The celebrant himself, be he
bishop or cardinal, receives, either standing or seated, the
ashes from some other priest, usually the highest in dignity
of those present. In earlier ages a penitential procession
often followed the rite of the distribution of the ashes, but
this is not now prescribed.
There can be no doubt that the custom of distributing the
ashes to all the faithful arose from a devotional imitation of
the practice observed in the case of public penitents. But
this devotional usage, the reception of a sacramental which
is full of the symbolism of penance (cf. the cor contritum
quasi cinis of the “Dies Irae”) is of an earlier date than was
formerly supposed.
It is mentioned as of general
observance for both clerics and faithful in the Synod of
Beneventum, 1091 (Mansi, XX, 739), but nearly a hundred
years earlier than this the Anglo-Saxon Homilist Ælfric
assumes that it applies to all classes of men. “We read”,
he says, in the books both in the Old Law and in the New
that the men who repented of their sins bestrewed
themselves with ashes and clothed their bodies with
sackcloth. Now let us do this little at the beginning of our
Lent that we strew ashes upon our head to signify that we
ought to repent of our sins during the Lenten fast.