Ave Maria Meditations
This year the Feast of the Holy Innocents is on a Sunday, and it will be the Feast of the Holy Family instead. And what constitutes a family? Children do. How then is the situation with children, born and unborn?
“Then Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the wisemen, was in a furious rage, and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time which she had ascertained from the wisemen. Then was fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet Jeremiah: a voice was heard in Rama, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel, weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they were no more.” (Mt 2:16-18)
From Fr. William Faber’s book on Bethlehem: “There is sorrow, therefore, even in Bethlehem. Though it seems to be a place of pure joy, and fountains of joy stream from it daily over the whole earth, there was a deep sorrow in it also; a sorrow so universal that it makes all its brightness pathetic. Although when the hearts of men, it must lie in light forever, a thundercloud can hang even over Bethlehem. But it’s not merely the shade of a distant foreseen sorrow which is cast over that sunny slope. There is real sorrow there, deeper than common human sorrow, such a divine sorrow as belongs only to the mysteries of the incarnation.
It will end so far as Bethlehem is concerned, in the wildest mother’s wailings that have ever awakened the echoes of the Earth. We shall not rightly understand the sacred infancy until we have walked and mused by the shores of this great sorrow, seemingly so out of place and season. A devotion which is founded on the sacred Infancy as if it were simply the opposite of the passion, will neither be deep nor lasting. If it is not altogether untrue, It is at least inadequate.”
The sorrow from the murder of the Holy Innocents in Bethlehem continues down through the centuries even to this day with a loss of innocence in children and the killing of the unborn. There are the unheard screams from the children in the womb and the anguish of children damaged for life from the perversions of others. We can recall the words of Saint Teresa of Calcutta: “And I feel one thing I want to share with you all, the greatest destroyer of peace today is the cry of the innocent unborn child. For if a mother can murder her own child in her own womb, what is left for you and for me to kill each other? “From Herod, who ordered the killing of the little ones 2000 years ago, to the present killing of the unborn and the killing of the innocence of children nowadays, we can understand why there is not peace in this world and also a loss of peace in families. Where can holy innocence be found?
