Around the world, faithful celebrate Ash Wednesday, start of Lenten season
March 5 (UPI) -- The 40-day season of Lent began as Christian faithful around the world celebrated Ash Wednesday in preparation for Easter.
Ashes "revive in us the memory of what we are," but also "the hope of what we will be," the ailing Pope Francis wrote for this year's Ash Wednesday liturgy in his homily held in Rome's Basilica of Saint Sabina.
Ash Wednesday is the start of the 40 days of Lent leading up to Easter Sunday. Roman Catholics and members of some other Christian denominations have ashes placed on their foreheads on the first day of Lent as a reminder of their own mortality.
"Today, followers of Christ wear crosses of ash on their foreheads -- a sacred reminder of our mortality and our enduring need for Christ's infinite mercy and redeeming love," U.S. President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump wrote in a statement.
It's a period traditionally signifying a period of penance, reflection and fasting among those of the Catholic faith.
"As we solemnly contemplate Jesus Christ's suffering and death on the cross this Lent, let us prepare our souls for the coming glory of the Easter miracle," the Trump's added.
Meanwhile, the 88-year-old pontiff remains in a stable but "complex" condition at Rome's Gemelli hospital where he's been treated since Feb. 14 for double pneumonia.
The pope's "situation this morning seems stable," the Vatican said Wednesday in an update, "though within a complex framework," they stressed, and that he "did not run a fever, and remained alert."
"We bow our heads in order to receive the ashes," Francis wrote in part to commemorate the religious day, "as if to look at ourselves, to look within ourselves. Indeed, the ashes help to remind us that our lives are fragile and insignificant: we are dust, from dust we were created, and to dust we shall return," he continued.
Christian leaders going as far back as 2011 began to notice a visible uptick in their parishioners giving up Facebook and social media for Lent as a sign of their faith.
In Los Angeles, Archbishop Jose H. Gomez held a bilingual mass at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels.
"Lent gives us a new opportunity to be more serious about our personal conversion to Christ, more serious about becoming the people that God wants us to be," said Gomez.
In 2009 during an Ash Wednesday sermon in Rome, then-Pope Benedict XVI said "It should be an "encouragement to conversion and sincere love for our brothers, especially those who are most poor and in need," he stated.
But fragility, the current pope continued Wednesday, is not just an individual experience.
"We also experience it when, in the social and political realities of our time, we find ourselves exposed to the 'fine dust' that pollutes our world," said Francis, including through the abuse of power, "ideologies based on identity that advocate exclusion," which he said is war, violence and exploitation of the earth's resources.
Meanwhile, next week Cardinal Robert McElroy, the bishop of San Diego since 2015, is set to be the next archbishop of Washington to replace the retiring Cardinal Wilton Gregory.
McElroy lead Ash Wednesday services at Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle in the nation's capital.
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