Social media was full of it: pictures of crowded Catholic Churches from Scotland to South Carolina. Catholics rejoicing in “churches fuller than they have ever seen them” and so forth and so on. As usual in our parish the secretary was grumbling about the endless phone calls (obviously from non parishioners else they would have read the bulletin) asking for Mass times and “when can I get the ashes?”. Houebound parishioners who decline regular home communion visits calling to make sure someone comes with the ashes.

In the first parish where I worked as a priest the pastor asked me after the Ash Wednesday Mass to go out to the crowd of people waiting for ashes who didn’t want to come to Mass.

So what is this strange frenzy about Ash Wednesday? I was discussing it with my parish staff and they were similarly flummoxed.

Is it simply (as I suspected in my cynical moments) a kind of residual Catholic superstition–the ashes ward off the evil eye–like some kind of modern suburban voodoo? Is it the last gasps of cultural Catholicism? You know–“We don’t usually go to Mass, but my Italian grandmother always said we had to get the ashes.” Is it some form of weird self. dramatization. I’m aware that confession and talking to a priest–in the popular imagination–is right up there with spooky black and white Hitchcock films, the exorcist movies and other Catholic high drama that the Evangelicals never seem to carry off (except perhaps with those scary Left Behind rapture movies) So is “getting the ashes” a form of seventh grade girl self dramatization? Maybe its just a fashionable trend–the way wearing rosaries as jewelry was a few years ago.

All of these less than worthy thoughts rattled through my mind, but still puzzled, I thought about it more positively. Perhaps what we are seeing is a deep, even unconscious need for repentance and faith. The words at the imposition of ashes contain the core gospel message: “Repent and Believe the Gospel”. Maybe, just maybe the thousands who turn up to “get the ashes” are responding o this unconscious human hunger to repent and believe. If so, then this is a good thing and every time I imposed ashes I proclaimed the core gospel message. The message of John the Baptist and Our Lord Jesus Christ.

Furthermore, if each person went away and even just a little repented and believed, then thousands of people were saved yesterday. As a former Evangelical Protestant I remember the altar calls where the preacher would call on folks to “get up out of their seat and come forward to repent of their sins and put their trust in the Lord Jesus Christ” We did just that yesterday for millions of souls in thousands and thousands of Catholic Churches worldwide.

Talk about a mega church!

Wow!