When Ash Wednesday Falls on Valentine’s Day, Love and Death Compete

Eugene Diamond spent Tuesday morning dipping strawberries into chocolate at his family’s sweet shop in a small town outside Kansas City. It was the day before Valentine’s Day, and all things chocolate were in high demand.

For Mr. Diamond, a practicing Catholic, another deadline was also looming: This year, Valentine’s Day happens to fall on Ash Wednesday, customarily devoted to penitence and fasting. Starting that day, Mr. Diamond, his wife and eight children will be giving up sweets until Easter, which falls this year on March 31.

Mr. Diamond, 39, taste-tested the sweets at the shop on Tuesday to prepare. “I’ve got to try these today because I’m not going to have a chance to try them tomorrow,” he said.

Ash Wednesday is the first day of Lent, a season marked by sacrifice and solemnity. At church services across the country, clergy members will smudge crosses on parishioners’ foreheads, murmuring, “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

The day is meant to serve as a reminder of human mortality, the start of a season that contrasts with and culminates in the joyful celebration of Easter. Practicing Catholics forgo meat on Ash Wednesday, and the church also asks people aged 18 to 59 to eat just one full meal, plus two smaller ones “that together are not equal to a full meal.”

That makes it a tough match with Valentine’s Day, a celebration of romantic love often marked with rich foods, wine and candy.

For Catholics and others who observe the Christian liturgical calendar, the juxtaposition presents something of a dilemma. Across the country, clergy members and their flocks are figuring out ways to have their molten chocolate cake and eat it, too — just not all on the same day.

The two holidays fell on the same day in 2018, and will do so again in 2029. After that, Catholics, Episcopalians and others will be clear of the strange overlap until the year 2170, some liturgical experts said. (Ash Wednesday is pegged to Easter, a “movable feast” whose date is determined by the lunar calendar.)

“Valentine’s Day has a mood of celebratory indulgence, and Ash Wednesday has a much more solemn mood,” said Gabrielle Girgis, 33, a practicing Catholic and postdoctoral fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center who lives in South Bend, Ind.

Ms. Girgis’s older children go to a Catholic school that will celebrate Valentine’s Day in the classroom a day early to avoid the conflict. Her family will go to Mass and have a simple soup supper on Wednesday. On Thursday, she and her husband will celebrate Valentine’s Day at Jesús Latin Grill and Tequila Bar, a Latin American restaurant.

Online, Catholics and others had fun with the juxtaposition.

“Valentine, I’d like to take you out for a small meal that, when combined with another small meal, doesn’t exceed your large meal,” said one widely shared message on social media.

“You can’t spell Valentine’s without Lent,” others pointed out.

In Austin, the Rev. Noah Stansbury, an Episcopal priest who serves students at the University of Texas, ordered custom candy hearts that read “DUST 2 DUST,” “LIFE IS SHORT” and “UR SO LOVED.” He said he would pass them out on Wednesday at an “ashes to go” station on campus, offering passers-by a quick prayer and the customary cross of ashes on their foreheads.

“It’s a way to change the story a little bit, to point to the core message that life is short and we know that,” Mr. Stansbury said. “This is a reminder that if you want to change the way you’re living, God loves you enough to help you with that.”

He got the idea for the candy from his friend Jay Hulme, a poet who wrote on social media that “people will be going about their valentine’s days, being all cute and loving, and clergy are gonna be out on the streets in black robes with pots of ash like ‘DEATH! DEATH! DEATH!’”

Some Catholic clergy members are reminding their flocks that in the church calendar, Ash Wednesday clearly trumps Valentine’s Day, which has some of its origins in honoring a third-century saint but is now essentially a secular holiday.

In St. Augustine, Fla., Bishop Erik Pohlmeier was among those who encouraged couples in his diocese to celebrate Valentine’s Day a day early this year. That would have put the celebration on Mardi Gras, or Fat Tuesday, a day traditionally marked by a big pancake supper and other immoderate and extravagant indulgences on the night before fasting and sobriety take over for Lent. As Shakespeare’s Falstaff might have put it: Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we remember our death.

But Bishop Pohlmeier did not see the spirit of Valentine’s Day as inherently at odds with the message of Lent.

In the season leading to Easter, “we recognize in our faith that God himself chose to come to us in this totally self-giving way,” he said. “Human love is meant to be an expression of that kind of love.”

He pointed out that there was more drama in Catholic circles when St. Patrick’s Day fell on a Friday in Lent last year, prompting some bishops to grant special dispensations for consuming meat on a holiday known for corned beef.

Outside Kansas City, Mr. Diamond, who also works as a consultant for nonprofit organizations, planned to attend Mass with his family on Wednesday. But on Tuesday night, he and his wife were heading to a brewery hop arranged by School of Love, a ministry for Catholic couples supported by the Archdiocese of Kansas City. It was billed as a Valentine’s date night, but scheduled for the 13th out of deference to Ash Wednesday.

“It is somewhat complicated to do the event and try to take a bunch of things that don’t seem like they go together and try to make it work,” said Mike Dennihan, who founded School of Love with his wife, Kristi Dennihan. He noted that both beer and sweets would be available for those who would be giving up either, or both, starting the next day.

Elsewhere in Kansas City, the Chiefs prepared to celebrate their Super Bowl victory with a typically beer-soaked parade and rally downtown on Wednesday.

The team’s kicker, Harrison Butker, who speaks often about his Catholic faith, said that he would be attending Mass in the morning with his wife and children. Though he’ll participate in the parade, he added in an email to The New York Times, “I won’t be celebrating in the usual way with food and drink since it’s a day of fasting as well as abstinence from meat.”

For Mr. Butker, the trade-off is worth it.

“Just like there is no Super Bowl without sacrifice, there is no Resurrection without our Lord’s sacrifice,” he wrote. “This will be tough, but I have to remember that if I want to celebrate our Lord’s Resurrection on Easter I have to participate in his suffering during Lent.”