At St. John the Evangelist Catholic church in Pocasset, as parishioners left their Ash Wednesday service socially distanced from each other and wearing masks, some received a cross mark of ash from the Rev. Tom Frechette, using a cotton swab instead of his thumb.
While Frechette said Tuesday that the usual individual hand contact "is a very natural human way and part of the way we communicate,” parishioners understood the change on Wednesday. Frechette said his parishioners told him, “We still get ashes and we still pray.”
Across the Cape, the tradition of starting the Lenten season with priests placing ash crosses on foreheads looked quite different during the COVID-19 pandemic.