Receiving non-Catholic ashes

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A few years ago I declined a coworker’s invitation to go to her Lutheran church at lunchtime to receive ashes.

Would it have been ok to go? Would the ashes have been valid but illicit? 🤔 😁
 
Receiving ashes is not a sacrament, so there is neither validity or liceity. Seems like in the past few years ashes have been distributed by both priests and laypersons at my parish.
 
I think it’s odd that non Catholic churches do it.

I’d go with the genuine article.
 
What, exactly, are fake ashes i.e., vs. the “genuine article?” I would have thought ashes, as a sign of humility and penance, are ashes. And I rejoice that some non-Catholic churches are restoring this practice.
 
Pitcairn17 said:
What, exactly, are fake ashes i.e., vs. the “genuine article?” I would have thought ashes, as a sign of humility and penance, are ashes. And I rejoice that some non-Catholic churches are restoring this practice.
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Protestant ministers don’t have valid holy orders, which are required for blessing the ashes (the laity cannot bless them, although we may distribute them). So the “genuine article” are those ashes which have been blessed by a priest.
 
Hmm…I believe the ashes are blessed by the Priest and or Deacon also they are confected with the ashes of burnt palm leaves from the previous year Palm Sunday celebration AND those are also blessed.

So no, I would not go to a Lutheran church for Ash Wednesday, I’ll go to the “real deal” as someone mentioned.
 
It would be okay, as in not sinful, to receive Protestant ashes, but they wouldn’t be blessed and since the Protestants have pretty much copped the ashes distribution from the Catholics, I too would go to the Catholic church for the “real deal”.

In recent years, Protestants have noticed that Ash Wednesday is one of the biggest (if not the biggest, depending on which clergy you ask) attendance days at the Catholic church because apparently everybody loves getting ashes. They have sought to get in on the action by handing out ashes themselves. When I was a kid, no Protestant churches had ashes, and walking around with the ash on your forehead all day was the mark of a Catholic.
 
So let’s see:Trinitarian Protestant Baptisms are valid, but their ashes are fake. Interesting. And it’s disheartening to see the attitude that this is all about Protestants “copping” something from us, trying to “get in on the action,” as opposed to the re-adoption of a small liturgical practice that was discarded centuries ago. Apparently there’s a Catholic patent on ashes; who knew?
 
When I was young, there was discussion about whether it was okay for a Catholic to wash off the ashes or did one have to wear them all day.

The reason people would wash them off was in order to not get abuse from Protestants for having a visible Catholic sign on your forehead…boys would beat up Catholic boys, Catholic people in the workplace would get reprimanded or made fun of for having ashes on, etc. So it was basically, were you tough enough to be a possible “Catholic martyr” all day from walking around with ashes on your forehead. Us kids would try to keep them on all day to show we were proud of being a Catholic and ready to stand up to whatever slings and arrows might come our way.

That’s why I find it highly ironic that now the Protestants are all handing out ashes to their own flocks. It was definitely not done 50 years ago.

And the reason they do it now is because it’s popular. There are a million other liturgical traditions the Catholics have that the Protestants don’t touch, but if they saw the tradition filling up churches, you bet they would see if they could do something similar. It’s called marketing, and most Protestant ministers are better at it/ more focused on it than Catholic priests.
 
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Lutheran services are very similar to catholic services in Australia. I realise the lutheran church is very different in the US -one of the implications of not having a pope equivalent.

OP I went to their servcie today as I work for a Lutheran organisation. It was devout and very similar to a catholic service. Many staff have memories of Ash Wednesday from their childhood so it would have been part of their tradition for quite some time.

I highly doubt protestants are trying to steal catholic ideas/traditions. Considering we are losing numbers at a fast rate it doesn’t really seem logical. Protestants have the same historical roots also so of course will have very similar traditions. Go to a high Anglican service - the average catholic would barely spot the difference.
 
Wow. I didn’t even know that Luthereans also celebrate ash wednesday.
 
Around here, Protestants aren’t having any trouble filling up their huge praise cathedrals. I’d be very surprised if they are copping the ashes from Catholics hoping to lure people in.

Decades ago when I attended Protestant churches, some did ashes, others didn’t, but Lent was observed and taken seriously as a time for spiritual reflection, prayer and sacrifice.
 
At the university where I work the Catholic, Episcopalian, and Lutheran groups on campus come together to offer a lunchtime Ash Wednesday service. There are scripture readings, songs, a homily, and the distribution of ashes. It’s one of the few times during the year that different Christian groups can actually come together as one. I find it inspiring and refreshing to see this sign of unity.
 
I don’t see why receiving “Catholic” vs. “Non-Catholic” ashes would matter. It is not the ashes that necessarily matter, but the Word of God proclaimed. So in the case of Lent, I expect you would find a very similar focus of the sermon and liturgy as you would find in your own parish. Just my thought.
 
Out of curiosity, @Tis_Bearself, when you say Protestant, does that include Episcopalian? I’d have guessed that the Anglo-Catholic wing of TEC, at any rate, would have got on board with Ash Wednesday a long while ago. But of course I am thinking of the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church of England, which has had a tendency to be ‘more Catholic than the Catholics’. Would somewhere like St Mary the Virgin (Smoky Mary’s) in Midtown Manhattan have been doing ashes fifty years ago?
 
Jureg said:
Wow. I didn’t even know that Luthereans also celebrate ash wednesday.
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Yes, we typically hold to the traditional liturgical cycle (Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost, etc.).
 
Londoner, as you note the Episcopal (and Anglican, as we now have Anglican churches in USA that are not affiliated with Episcopal from what I’ve been told) do hand out ashes now, and often very publicly such as handing them out on the commuter train platform or street corner for people who couldn’t make it to church or aren’t church goers. Other Protestant churches also participate in giving out the ashes on the street as well.

I am not sure when the Episcopal church started doing this or if it was just something that people receied at church and immediately washed off, rather than going around with the ashes on all day as Catholics did, but the Episcopal church in USA was historically a church of the well-to-do because of the first immigrants to USA, in other words the landed gentry and the wealthier tradesmen who could vote and such, being Episcopal. These people didn’t want to be seen as publicly imitating Catholic customs and really distanced themselves from anything that Catholic immigrants (the Irish, the Italians, the Polish, the German Catholics and so on) were doing. It’s a little different in England where the “Church of England” pretty much sees itself as England’s own Catholic Church.

Ashes are still very identified with Catholics in USA, as this article on recent discrimination cases shows.

 
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Unblessed ashes are still a sign of penitence. But they are not a sacramental.

Only clergy who are part of an unbroken apostolic succession from Jesus Christ, through the laying on of hands, have the power to bless and create sacramentals.

So if you get an Episcopal priest with the right “lineage,” you might get blessed ashes. Maybe. Eastern Orthodox priest? No problem. Other Christian non-liturgical, non-lineage groups? Probably just charcoal, although very sincere charcoal. And their idea of what they are doing might be very different, or even dead wrong in an offensive way.

That does not mean that ordinary Christians do not have the power to bless, say, their own kids, or that non-Catholics would not sometimes receive blessings by special favor from God. But sacramentals are only connected with apostolic abilities.

Trinitarian Baptism is a Sacrament that can be performed not only by Christians, but by anyone who wishes to baptize as the Church baptizes, and who uses water and words correctly. The Sacrament leans on the powers of the Church as a whole, given to her by Christ, which is why pagans and atheists can do it. Priestly powers and bishop powers are totally different, which is why a Catholic layperson cannot bind and loose.
 
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Yes, in the UK the Church of England is known as ‘the Conservative Party at prayer’, and I believe that in the USA the phrase used to describe the Episcopal Church is ‘the country club at prayer’. On a visit to the USA many years ago now I was actually taken to a country club by an Episcopalian family, so maybe it is true!

But I think you are right to point out the important differences. The Church of England has tended to be the default religion for everybody in England who does not make a point of belonging to a different denomination (Protestant non-conformist or Catholic), so there is no particular prestige associated with being an Anglican. Conversely, if you’re a Catholic in England it means that you’re either a recusant (nobility/landed gentry), an immigrant (mainly working class, obvious exception being post-war Polish settlers), or a convert (associated with intellectual types, especially from Oxford University), so unless you have an obviously Irish name there can be a kind of snobbish cachet about being a Catholic (think the Hon. Jacob Rees-Mogg, Lord and Lady Nicholas Windsor, etc). Certainly where Anglicans have wanted to distance themselves from Catholicism it has had more to do with theology than not wanting to seem like working-class immigrants.

But that’s a bit of a digression. I think in the UK somebody with ashes on their forehead would just be assumed to be a Christian, which is considered strange enough these days; I don’t think it is particularly associated with Catholicism.
 
Another thing to remember is that many parts of the USA are dominated by evangelical churches, which historically did not hand out ashes. These days, some do, but it’s not traditional for them, and in fact here is one Baptist church that has been doing it for a few years and yet felt it needed to write a whole discussion on its website explaining why it is doing a practice “associated with Roman Catholics”.

http://www.alfredstreet.org/media-and-print/a-baptist-view-on-the-imposition-of-ashes/

So it’s not like ashes are the default in those regions, and when somebody does see ashes, they’re going to think “Catholic practice” rather than “Anglican practice” or “Lutheran practice”.
 
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