The Slaughter of the Innocents Goes On and On

Precisely because almost everyone has forgotten it, I wanted to point out that today (the 28th of December) is the day on which we are supposed to remember innocent children who have been martyred by adult wickedness (even my small village Church did not feature the Collect for Holy Innocents’ Day today).

 

The explanation for this melancholy commemoration falling so soon after Christmas is obvious to anyone who knows the Gospels, but since many nowadays do not, it refers to the massacre of male children in Bethlehem by Herod who (told by the Wise Men of the birth of Christ) sought to kill a possible threat to his power before the child was old enough to defend himself.

 

But the Holy Family had by this time fled to Egypt, and so the massacre was futile as well as cruel.

 

Perhaps the most profoundly disturbing artistic representation of this event was made by the great Flemish painter Peter Bruegel

 

See it here http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1127262/The-wider-view-Haunting-picture-conceals-silent-massacre-goes-display.html

 

The picture (as I explain in the link) was also a reference to what were then modern events, and so it has been crudely censored. Most generations are repelled by Herod, and cannot see that they have anything in common with him, or deny it when it is pointed out.

 

This is definitely true today of those who actively promote, or complacently ignore, the daily massacre of innocents which takes place in the abortion factories of our self-styled ‘advanced’ world , 180,000 a year in this country alone.  Many of them nowadays are girls , not boys, victims of the frightful gendercide perpetrated by cultures which regard female babies as disasters, and can now kill them in  the womb thanks to the universal availability of cheap scanning machines.  This is particularly evident in China, see here:

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2010/04/gendercide-chinas-shameful-massacre-of-unborn-girls-means-there-will-soon-be-30m-more-men-than-women.html

 

But it is by no means confined to that country.

 

We should surely reflect on  this, and how we can permit it to continue and regard ourselves as civilised.

 

One of the most beautiful of all carols (the saddest are always the most moving), the Coventry Carol’,  is a lament (from an ancient mystery play, the Coventry Shearmen and Tailors’ Pageant) for the lost children.

 

Lully, lullay, thou little tiny child,

Bye bye, lully, lullay.

Lully, lullay, thou little tiny child,

Bye bye, lully, lullay.

O sisters too, how may we do

For to preserve this day

This poor youngling for whom we sing,

"Bye bye, lully, lullay"?

Herod the king, in his raging,

Charged he hath this day

His men of might in his own sight

All young children to slay.

That woe is me, poor child, for thee

And ever mourn and may

For thy parting neither say nor sing,

"Bye bye, lully, lullay."

 

The Gospel for the Day, from St Matthew’s second chapter, ends with that terrible quotation from Jeremiah: ‘In Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not.’