Baby Bones

Today, December 28, is the Feast of the Holy Innocents in the Western Church. We Orthodox observe it on December 29. This past summer, I was taken into a cave under the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, and shown what the Church believes are relics of the Holy Innocents: the bones of dead babies, found in Bethlehem.

I asked our guide how we could be sure these were the bones of some of the infants massacred at the order of King Herod? The story is here, in Matthew 2:16-18:

¹⁶ When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi. ¹⁷ Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:

¹⁸ “A voice is heard in Ramah,
    weeping and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children
    and refusing to be comforted,
    because they are no more.”

Jesus escaped the massacre because his mother and father had fled for Egypt. Anyway, the guide said that St. Helena, the Christian mother of Constantine, discovered them on her famous journey to the Holy Land in 325-326. Tradition has it that she bribed a rabbi to tell her where the massacred children’s bodies had been buried. I don’t know how truthful that is, but that’s the tradition, and there has been a church on that site — revered by the early church as the Messiah’s birthplace — since 330.

In any case, today and tomorrow are the days in which the ancient churches remember those baby boys murdered by power, to protect itself. The pro-life movement considers the Holy Innocents to be patrons of the unborn whose lives were taken so that their mothers, who had power over their life or death, could live as she wanted to live. Today (and every day), those innocent babes now living in glory surely pray for the souls of their mothers and fathers, for their repentance. And maybe we should all ask the Holy Innocents for their prayers, that we all would repent of the way nearly all of us fail children in our world today. This past year, I spoke to someone who works to fight sex trafficking, and he told me the market for children is large. Plus, we have created a Machine in the West today, one that requires robbing little children of their innocence and sexualizing them, for the sake of Progress. It is a vile thing, what Power does to the Powerless.

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