Who Put the Ashes in Ash Wednesday? by Sean Fitzpatrick

By Sean Fitzpatrick, Crisis Magazine, March 5, 2025

Sean Fitzpatrick is a senior contributor to Crisis and serves on the faculty of Gregory the Great Academy, a Catholic boarding school for boys in Pennsylvania.

The ashes of Ash Wednesday come to us from no less a personage than Pope St. Gregory the Great.

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. …

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