It is Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. And the Catholics have come for their ashes. In a small city dominated by not one, but two, enormous Catholic congregations, Ash Wednesday, of course, is about more than repentence and piety. It is also about belonging, about community. But he will leave to his parishioners to decide.
Old habits die hard, their priest tells a reporter later.
And, in the old days, the handful of South Amboy kids who dared show up at school without ashes on their foreheads got beaten for their impudence. The Presbyterians have no record of families. They count folks - and they've got 128 of them. And then there's everybody else. It's not just that the Catholics dominate the religious scene.