The problem is when people who are very provincial just assume that the way things have been in their locality in living memory is the way things have always been, everywhere. For instance, here's an old picture showing ashes sprinkled on top of the head in Europe:
And here's a picture of John Paul II receiving it the same way:
That's from
a blog called RomanSacristan, where he observes: "I prefer the way they do it in Italy. On Ash Wednesday when I received ashes at Saint Peter's Basilica, they just sprinkle the ashes on top of your head in the form of a cross. ... [W]here did the American forehead custom come from?"
And here are Christians in the Old City of Jerusalem also receiving ashes this way:
And here's a
really old picture (c. 1370) called "The Putting On of Ashes":
Plus,
here's a book from 1907 referring to "the Roman Catholic custom of sprinkling ashes on the head" (as current at that time), and
here's a book from 1900 confirming that it was also the "ancient Roman Catholic custom."
Believe me, I couldn't possibly have less interest in defending whatever they do in Rome, but it's disappointing when people dismiss a longstanding, legitimate, and noble Catholic practice just because it wasn't done in their tiny neck of the woods 50 years ago, and so anything different must be an outlandish novelty presumably caused by embarrassment at being Catholic or a desire to destroy tradition. I know it is nearly impossible to believe, but midcentury American Catholicism is not, in fact, the be-all and end-all of Catholicism. In many countries, if they started putting ashes on the forehead,
that would be destroying a tradition.