Ash Wednesday continues to compete with both Easter and Christmas for the highest attended Masses each year.
In fact, Ash Wednesday 2024 Mass attendance actually topped Christmas 2023 Mass attendance, according to Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate.
Why do so many people make an extra effort to get to church on Ash Wednesday – the first of Lent’s 40 days – when it is not a holy day of obligation, and they are not required to receive ashes?
“One of the things certainly is, for many people, it is a very clear identity marker that they’re Roman Catholic,” said Jesuit Father Bruce Morrill, theology professor and the chair of Roman Catholic Studies at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.
With their invitation to ponder mortality and sin, ashes’ materiality seems to appeal to people, and self-discipline is a natural attraction in a society focused on self-improvement.
“Religious practice requires the body, and it’s only a kind of really trite spirituality that forgets that, and tries to think about it simply as a kind of intellectual phenomenon,” said Timothy O’Malley, a theology professor at the University of Notre Dame.
Liz Kelly, a Catholic speaker and author, said that people “are created for order, and whether our lives are well ordered or disordered, we all still suffer from some disorder and we crave the order that is instilled in us from Divine Order. … Ash Wednesday responds to this deep desire for order, to re-ordering, an order that leads to new life, flourishing and peace.”
