The journey of Lent "unfolds amid the remembrance of our fragility and the hope that, at the end of the road, the Risen Lord is waiting for us," Pope Francis wrote in his homily for Ash Wednesday.
"Indeed, the ashes help to remind us that our lives are fragile and insignificant: we are dust, from dust we were created, and to dust we shall return," said the pope's text.
Although the 88-year-old pope was still in Rome's Gemelli hospital March 5, the day Latin-rite Catholics received ashes and began their Lenten observances, the Vatican released what it said was the homily he prepared for the occasion.
Cardinal Angelo De Donatis, head of the Apostolic Penitentiary, a church court, read Pope Francis' homily as he led the Ash Wednesday celebration usually presided over by the pope.
The cardinal prefaced his reading, though, by saying, "We are deeply united" with Pope Francis, and "we thank him for offering his prayer and his sufferings for the good of the whole church and the entire world."
The pope, who has been hospitalized since Feb. 14, delegated Cardinal De Donatis to preside over the rites.
The celebration began with the traditional penitential procession that leads from the Benedictine monastery of St. Anselm on Rome's Aventine Hill and goes to the Dominican-run Basilica of Santa Sabina, followed by Mass and the distribution of ashes.
Cardinals, bishops, dozens of Benedictine monks and nuns and Dominican friars and sisters took part in the procession and Mass.
Pope Francis, in the homily he had prepared, said people learn how fleeting earthly life is from their "fragility through illness, poverty and the hardships that can suddenly befall us and our families."
They also see it, though, in their experiences of weariness, weaknesses, fears and failure, the pope wrote.
But the experience of fragility is not only individual, he wrote. "We also experience it when, in the social and political realities of our time, we find ourselves exposed to the 'fine dust' that pollutes our world," including through the abuse of power, "ideologies based on identity that advocate exclusion," war, violence and the exploitation of the earth's resources.
Those forms of "toxic dust," he said, can pollute "the air of our planet impeding peaceful coexistence, while uncertainty and the fear of the future continue to increase."
A sense of fragility also leads people to try to hide or ignore the fact that everyone dies, he said. "Death, however, imposes itself as a reality with which we have to reckon, a sign of the precariousness and brevity of our lives."
But for Christians, the pope wrote, ashes and even death are signs of hope, too.
"We are invited to lift our eyes to the One who rises from the depths of death and brings us from the ashes of sin and death to the glory of eternal life," Pope Francis wrote.
Christ's death and resurrection "is the hope that restores to life the 'ashes' of our lives," he wrote. "Without such hope, we are doomed passively to endure the fragility of our human condition."
"The hope of Easter that we journey toward reassures us of God's forgiveness," the text added. "Even while submerged in the ashes of sin, hope opens us up to the joyful acknowledgment of life."
The call of Lent, Pope Francis wrote, is a call to turn to the Lord and so become "a sign of hope for the world."
The papal text also encouraged Catholics to follow the traditional Lenten practices of almsgiving, prayer and fasting.
Almsgiving, the pope said, teaches a person to look beyond themselves, meet the needs of others and, in that way, nurture "the hope of a fairer world."
Prayer is a reminder, "as Jacques Maritain put it, that we are 'beggars for heaven'" and hope that God is "waiting for us with open arms at the end of our earthly pilgrimage," he wrote.
"Finally," the pope wrote, "let us learn from fasting that we do not live merely to satisfy our needs, but that, hungry for love and truth, only the love of God and of one another can truly satisfy us and give us hope for a better future."
