All over the world celebrate loyal ashes on Wednesday, start of Lent season

Ash Wednesday is the beginning of the 40 days of Lent until Easter Sunday. The Catholics and members of some other Christian denominations put ashes on their foreheads on the first day of Lent to remind them of their own mortality.

“Today, successor to Christ's ash cross on the forehead – a holy memory of our mortality and our permanent need for the infinite mercy of Christ and the redeemed love,” wrote US President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump in an explanation.

It is a time that traditionally means a time of repentance, reflection and fasting among those of Catholic faith.

“When we solemnly think about the suffering and death of Jesus Christ on the cross in this period of Lent, let us prepare our souls for the upcoming glory of the Easter mouth,” added Trump.

In the meantime, the 88-year-old Pope remains in a stable but “complex” state in the Gemelli Hospital in Rome, where he has been treated since February 14th for double pneumonia.

The “situation of the Pope this morning” seems to be stable, said the Vatican on Wednesday in an update, “although they emphasized in a complex framework” and that he “had no fever and remained vigilant”.

“We bow to our heads to receive the ashes,” Francis partially wrote to remember the religious day, “as if we wanted to look at ourselves. In fact, the ashes help to remember that our life is fragile and insignificant: we are dust, we were created and to return to dust,” he continued.

The Christian leaders who declined until 2011 noticed a visible increase in their parishioners who duty Facebook and social media as a sign of their faith for Lent.

In Los Angeles, Archbishop Jose H. Gomez held a bilingual mass in the cathedral of our dear wife of the angels.

“Lent gives us the new opportunity to make our personal conversion to Christ more serious, and more serious to become people who want to have God from us,” said Gomez.

In 2009 the then Pope Benedict XVI said. During a sermon on Wednesday in Rome, it should be “encouragement for conversion and sincere love for our brothers, especially for those who are the poorest and in need,” he said.

But fragility, the current Pope, is not just an individual experience on Wednesday.

“We also experience it when we are exposed to the” fine dust “in the social and political realities of our time, which is polluted by our world,” said Francis, including abuse of power, “said ideologies that are based on identity that excludes the exclusion of war, violence and exploitation of the earth.

Next week, Cardinal Robert Mcelroy, the Bishop of San Diego since 2015, is to be the next Archbishop of Washington, who replaces the retired cardinal Wilton Gregory.

Mcelroy leads the ash on Wednesday services in the cathedral of St. Matthew, the apostle in the country's capital.