In the Catholic liturgical calendar, Ash Wednesday is the day on which Lent begins, 40 days before Holy Week begins. It commemorates the moment when Jesus retreated into the desert for forty days and Lent represents the cycle of preparation in which Christians celebrate the passion, death and resurrection of Christ.

The name is due to the fact that on this day a mass is celebrated in which a cross is marked on the forehead of the parishioners with ashes. These ashes are obtained by incinerating the blessed palms on Palm Sunday of the previous liturgical year.

According to the ritual, the ashes are applied to the forehead, in the form of a cross, accompanied by the words “Dust you are and to dust you shall return” from Genesis (3:19), to remind the faithful of their mortality, in the sense that they begin as dust and will return to dust after their death.

It is not necessary to be Catholic to receive the ashes, in fact this ritual itself is not obligatory for Christians. Although the Church calls on all those who have received the sacrament of baptism to attend the imposition of ashes and to take up the Lenten journey.

The origin of this ritual dates back to the Hebrew people, who used to cover themselves with ashes as a sign of penitence. Later in the Catholic Church, ashes were imposed only on public penitents as a sign of marginalization. But it ended up becoming a practice that for believers has the meaning of recognizing their own fragility and mortality.