If Catholicism is universal and crosses over time and space, then why would safeguarding ashes be sometime to hold in disdain?
I was at a Novus Ordo lecture one time and a modernist, pantsuit-wearing nun said that someone brought up the Council of Trent with her. She said aloud to those attending the lecture that "we're five hundred years past the Council of Trent" and the crowd busted out laughing as if the Catholic Church of the past is to be treating with mockery and derision (although these Novus Ordites were all laypersons so they literally bathe in modernism every minute of their day). I sat there saddened and wondered if I should raise my hand and say "Well now, wait a minute, the Council of Trent is 1500 years newer than Our Lord and Our Lady."
Pope Francis' comments regard ashes brings that to mind. Isn't the Catholic approach to preserve what has been handed to us? And wasn't it the Masons who brought us cremation so we could turn something into ashes?