My Reflections on Ash Wednesday
Strange as it may seem, my church is always packed for Ash Wednesday. The St. Paul Catholic Center offers five -yes – five Ash Wednesday services with a Mass: 7 a.m, 12:15 pm, 5:30 pm., 7:15 pm, 9 pm . We were advised to go to the early 7 a.m. Mass because all he parking lots would be full for the other Masses. So I arrived at 6:15 a.m., and the church was sparsely attended – and by 7 a.m. it was completely packed, 3 to 4 people deep standing at the back of the church! I had to ask people to step aside so I could leave during the recessional to avoid a traffic jam getting out in the parking lot!
At such a time, I think of my former parish in Oakland, California, Our Lady of Lourdes, which had vibrant Masses each weekend, Saturday at 5 pm and Sunday at 9:30 and 11 am., with 100 people or so at each. I attended during the Christmas season last year, on Sunday, Dec. 28 for the Feast of the Holy Family, an important celebration in the middle of the Octave of Christmas, usually well attended.
Now Lourdes holds only one Sunday Mass at 10 a.m., and the church was less than a third full, maybe 40 or 50 people at most. By my guess, the congregation has diminished by two-thirds in less than five years when I moved from Oakland. I could have cried for the church that was so beautifully renovated by Fr. Seamus Genovese, with an enormous organ, marble floors, restored stained glass windows. It was the church where I entered the Catholic Church at the Easter Vigil, and where I spent many years going from a solitary, unshaven stranger sitting in the back pew, crying, to one of the most active members participating in Masses and leading its program for new Catholics.
What has happened?
You might think Indiana is so conservative that we are a center of right-wing Catholicism, but do you know who packs the church? Students! Atheists, Protestants, and yes, some of older Catholics. Perhaps this doesn’t sound so astonishing to read this, but to be there and realize that the church is more packed on Ash Wednesday than on Christmas or Easter.
I think there is something elemental about receiving ashes of the burned palms of the previous Easter on our foreheads. We are so accustomed to thinking of the cycle of life at birth, but this recognizes the ending of the cycle of life in death. It’s deeper than our conscious minds, and calls us to reflect on the elemental question: What happens after death?
<♦>