Diocese recommends priests sprinkle ashes on head

Ash Wednesday is going to look a little different in the Diocese of Albany this year.

The Diocese, in accordance with the Vatican Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), is recommending due to COVID-19 that priests sprinkle ashes on the top of people’s heads on Feb. 17 rather than using the ashes to make a cross on their foreheads.

“We put our guidelines together a few weeks ago. We felt that we needed to do this, because Ash Wednesday is going to be here before you know it and, to be honest, Holy Week as well,” said Father Anthony Barratt, pastor at Holy Trinity Parish in Hudson and director of Prayer and Worship in the Diocese of Albany. “And would you believe it, we had literally published them and two hours later the Vatican issued guidelines on Ash Wednesday and the USCCB followed suit. And the nice thing was our guidelines are more or less the same … We were joking that, ‘Had they looked at our website first?’ ”

The liturgical guidelines released by the Diocese state: “The liturgical books indicate that the ashes are “imposed,” or that the minister “places (them) on the head,” using either of the given formulae (see below). An acceptable alternative (following ancient and biblical custom) to the traditional marking of the forehead with ashes would be to sprinkle ashes on the head of each person.”

Father Barratt said once the ashes are blessed, the priest would say loudly either formulae once — ‘Repent and believe in the Gospel’ or ‘Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return’ — and then the priest or minister can either go to the people, or the faithful would come up as for Communion, and then have the ashes sprinkled on their heads.

Sprinkling ashes on the head is a common practice at the Vatican and in Italy.

“In America and England we always think whatever we are doing everyone else must be doing it in the same way,” Father Barratt said. “As a matter of fact, there is a very ancient, biblical and scriptural way of having ashes for repentance (and) to have them sprinkled on your head. Its roots are deep in Scripture.”

This change is all about maintaining balance, said Father Barratt, in the time of a pandemic.

“It’s always a balancing act,” he said. “To balance, on the one hand, being prudent and following the various health protocols … with liturgical norms and the fact that our faith is very incarnational, it’s very earth. It’s very physical in a sense, for we use a lot of signs and symbols.

“That is the one thing I like about Catholic practice: people think it’s so proscribed. In fact, there are often options, or matters that are left deliberately a little bit open, so there is some room for legitimate adaptation or whatever is appropriate.”

The one connection that will be lost, however, is not seeing other Catholics with the ashes on their foreheads that day.

“There is something wonderful if you are out and about or in the street on Ash Wednesday seeing all these folks wandering around with ashes on their head,” Father Barratt said. “It is sort of an evangelization visual, but obviously we are in exceptional times.”