# Blessed ashes

**Cenere benedetta**

**Known today as.** Ashes of burnt palms, blessed on Ash Wednesday.

Kind: Sacramental

## What did Canale use it for?

Placed on head and breast of the sick; in the oil composition of Treatise Two; so that the devil “may have no power” (Treatise Two).

## What does modern science say?

Ash Wednesday remains one of the most attended days of the Catholic year.

## What did the older authorities say?

**The Catholic Encyclopedia.** The Catholic Encyclopedia finds the liturgical use of ashes “borrowed from the practice of the Jews” and connects it with the Rite of the Red Heifer, whose ashes “mixed with water had the ceremonial efficacy of purifying the unclean.” Tertullian has the penitent “live without joy in the roughness of sackcloth and the squalor of ashes.” In the early Middle Ages it was the custom “of laying a dying man on the ground upon sackcloth sprinkled with ashes when about to breathe his last,” the priest asking, “Art thou content with sackcloth and ashes in testimony of thy penance before the Lord, in the day of judgment?” and the dying man answering, “I am content.” Ashes are also strewn on the floor at the dedication of a church, “upon which all the alphabet is written in Greek and Latin letters.”

## Sources

- *The Catholic Encyclopedia* (New York, 1907–1914), “Ashes.” newadvent.org/cathen/01776c.htm

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*Blessed ashes.* In *Materia Medica*, edited by B. C. P. Statema. Version 1, revised 2026-10-01. The Thinking Press. https://thethinkingpress.org/materia-medica/blessed-ashes

Historical description, not medical advice.