The lure of blessed ashes proves strong in Dublin’s Pro Cathedral on Wednesday morning as about 300 people file in ahead of 10.30am Mass that marks the beginning of Lent.
Cathedral administrator Kieran McDermott raises an eyebrow when The Irish Times suggests a good turnout for a midweek, midmorning Mass.
“There was a time when we would have a queue out the door on Ash Wednesday. But I suppose we do have more people here today than we might on a normal Wednesday,” he concedes.
He downplays any suggestion that those who had come into the church were there for any ostentatious purpose, adding he does not believe people have ashes on their forehead as a badge of Catholic honour.
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“This is not about wearing your faith on your sleeve and it’s not about parading your Catholicism. In fact, it is quite the opposite – it is a very private thing,” he says.
As people aged from eight to 80, from countries worldwide, settle into the pews, some seem happier with the Lenten marking on their foreheads – traditionally a sign of repentance – than others.
The happiest are also keen to wear their faith, if not on their sleeves as Fr McDermott says, then certainly on their heads.
They are the children from the Central Model School on Marlborough Street, across from the church, eager to compare crosses as they traipse giggling from the altar back to their seats.
The priest and deacon administering the ashes have very different styles, with one making a clear and large sign of the cross on each forehead and the other content with a smudge.
The children who end up with smudges look distinctly crestfallen when sitting beside those with big crosses. They are not, however, as crestfallen as the few latecomers who arrive in the church just as communion starts in the mistaken belief that the ashes would be among the last things to be dispensed on the day.
A couple leaves with foreheads bare and are further disgruntled when they realise the holy water font outside the church is dry.
Standing outside the church are two members of the Legion of Mary in full recruiting mode, delighted with the dry morning and how easy their job appears to be.
The two men hand out miraculous medals as part of what one, Iain Bennett, describes as a new initiative for the legion.
“It is much easier for us this way,” he notes with a smile. “Sure aren’t they all marked men and women here? They’re very easy to identify.”
While those coming out of the church have the thick black ashes glistening in spring sunshine, his has faded almost completely, having been applied in his local church at 8.30am.
The ashes may have faded with time but his faith has deepened, he says. And after going “through a valley in my 20s and 30s” he returned to Catholicism in his 50s.
As he dispenses the medals, a woman, Marie, from Inchicore skips out of the church.
“I had to come in,” she says. “Sure isn’t it the way we were all brought up,” she adds, before declining to give her full name as “my kids will kill me”.
Bernadette Sexton from Clare has no problem sharing her full name and demonstrates the mark of her faith proudly on her forehead.
She never misses the ashes on this day and neither does her brother Chris, who is by her side.
“I’d never miss this,” he says. “Sure without that, without our faith, what would we be but dust, just pieces of dust?”
