Billy Graham, the man symbol of the Evangelicals in the United States, is gone. He was a great admirer of John Paul II and helped to ease relations with the Catholics.

As eighteenth century English writer Samuel Johnson might have put it, “Nothing concentrates the mind like knowing that I am dust, and to dust I shall return.” And nothing is a more bracing reminder of that reality than the imposition of ashes on Ash Wednesday. Placed on the forehead in the form of the cross, the ashes symbolize the Great Paradox: to live, I must die.

Following is a reflection of Cardinal Donald Wuerl, archbishop of Washington, titled, ‘Ash Wednesday: Beginning Our Lenten Pilgrimage':

During Lent and the celebrations of the Eucharist Year, Christians in the “Land of the Pure” remember their martyrs, as their endure their struggles with faith.

On the streets of Youhanabad, a Christian neighborhood in Lahore, in the southern part of Pakistan’s Punjab capital, children play on dirt roads amid busy small businesses. There seems to be no trace left of the fear or tension that three years ago besieged the local faithful, after the suicide bombings that simultaneously struck the two Christian churches in the neighborhood, one Catholic, the other Protestant.

Jesus is the poor person whose life began in a manger and ended on a cross. When He, a carpenter’s son, began his public life, He had nowhere to stay, nowhere to lay his head, nothing to eat.

His actions don’t touch upon human suffering and emptiness or from the outside; He personally enters into them, carries our burdens and bears them all the way to abandonment and death.

He doesn’t destroy his enemies with a powerful lightning-bolt from the sky; He lets himself be scourged and taunted— and he forgives those who hurt him.

It is the overarching message of Lent, meant as a lifelong commitment: to let ourselves be reconciled with God in Jesus Christ, allowing Him to generate a new heart inside us in the image and likeness of His heart. In concrete terms, this transformation occurs along the only/threefold path indicated by Matthew on Ash Wednesday: almsgiving, prayer, and fasting

Be patient with these 40 days and allow the emptying process takes place.

The goal of Lent is to go into the desert, to allow ourselves to experience emptiness. We can’t hear God if we’re not listening. We won’t recognize our need for God unless we allow ourselves to become aware of our own lacking. In a culture that almost demands we be sated, stimulated and entertained 24/7, opting not to instantly gratify anything becomes an almost radical act of the will. It’s also an opportunity to really recognize, all we can offer, is our will to God.

Be patient with these 40 days and allow the emptying process takes place.

The goal of Lent is to go into the desert, to allow ourselves to experience emptiness. We can’t hear God if we’re not listening. We won’t recognize our need for God unless we allow ourselves to become aware of our own lacking. In a culture that almost demands we be sated, stimulated and entertained 24/7, opting not to instantly gratify anything becomes an almost radical act of the will. It’s also an opportunity to really recognize, all we can offer, is our will to God.

The Holy See sends a contribution to the initiatives of Jinde Charities, the network of charitable works connected to the Catholic Church in China. A sign that the communion between Chinese Catholics, the bishop of Rome and the universal Church is already being lived at its most concrete and gratuitous level of shared charity.

Two years ago, Pope Francis and the Patriarch of Moscow Kirill met in the Cuban capital. At this time the common commitment to the Christian communities in the Middle East was strengthened. In Havana, both leaders used the word "genocide" to define the persecution of Christians. The optimism of Metropolitan Hilarion.