Black dot, red dot

I always forget, from year to year, and thus am annually surprised to see all those people downtown walking around with dirty faces. Then I remember it's Ash Wednesday, and those dots and crosses are deliberate, rather than merely bad washing habits.
Technically, the spots are the ashes of the palms that were paraded around the church the previous Sunday, sort of the Catholic equivalent of the tilak the Hindus wear (that 'red dot on the forehead' thing), only once a year rather than daily.
(Few Catholics these days, of course, know that Palm Sunday was originally the Jewish holiday of Sukkoth, and the palm leaves were used to build huts outside the temple, representing those the Jews lived in during their forty years wandering in the desert.)
This city has a much larger concentration of Catholics (Irish, Italians, and Poles) than I was used to on the West Coast; the prevalence of the Black Dot is much higher.
These overt displays of religiosity give me the shudders; I keep waiting for the drums to start beating. It's only a notch or two from there to the self-flagellation we see in the Shi'ite communities in Iraq, and even Catholics have a history of that.

These days, given the anti-Christian outlook of our Moslem brethren, it could also be the Catholic equivalent of 'shoot here, please'...