Innocents’ Day and the new Herods of today

In a clear act of charity and mercy and to ensure that Christians all over the world would never forget so that innocent children wouldn’t die in vain, the Catholic Church always commemorates the day when the Holy Innocents were martyred. This is why today is called The Feast of the Holy Innocents Day. Let me share a part of today’s gospel about this horrifying event that you can read in Matt. 2: 16-17.

“When Herod realized that he had been deceived by the Magi (who aided St. Joseph so that the Blessed Virgin Mary with the newborn Baby Jesus could flee to Egypt), he became furious. He ordered the massacre of all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had ascertained from the Magi. Then was fulfilled what had been said through Jeremiah, the prophet; “A voice was heard in Ramah, sobbing and loud lamentations; Rachel weeping for her children, and she would not be consoled, since they were no more.”

St. Joseph had the advantage of having an angel of the Lord appearing in a dream, telling him to “Rise, take the child and his mother, flee to Egypt, and stay there until I tell you. Herod is going to search for the child to destroy him.” Unfortunately, the children below two years old in St. Joseph’s native Bethlehem had no angel to warn them of their impending doom. This was an act of infanticide and gendercide perpetrated by Herod the Great, thus making him one of history’s most notorious characters.

But today, there are many Herods who live in our midst who, by their decrees, order the killing of the innocents. In the Philippines, you can put names into these Herods as most of them are congressmen and women who pushed for the Reproductive Health (RH) Bill, of course, upon the exhortation of the biggest Herod of all, Pres. Benigno “PNoy” Aquino, III who masterminded the passage of the RH Bill from his foreign masters.

Once, the Philippines was considered the “Last Bastion” of Catholicism, but with the passage of the RH Bill, our defensive wall of morality that protects the family and children has been breeched and true enough as I’ve so many columns ago pointed out, the next target is to introduce divorce (the RH bill has not yet been signed into law, and the promoters of the RH bill are already pushing their not-so-hidden-agenda for divorce), same sex marriage and their ultimate goal is abortion. God save us from his wrath if all these would happen in the near future.

Somehow, because of our cultural ties with Spain, the Feast of the Holy Innocents is celebrated in the Philippines as our equivalent to April Fool’s Day. This is why, today you will get calls from friends who will tell you some kind of so-good-to-be-true reports, like winning the lotto or a car or something you’d been longing to hear. But these friends are merely playing a prank on you. You may sheepishly obey their pranks only to realize that they got you fooled… which is why you, the “innocent” victim, cannot or should not get mad at these friends for they have not committed a sin against you because it is Holy Innocents’ Day.

On the serious side of today’s Feast of the Holy Innocents, if you didn’t know, every single day, holy innocents are being murdered by their own mothers through the use of contraceptives that would terminate the life of a fetus. While the Scripture did not say how many children were massacred in Bethlehem, various texts show that it ranged from a small number of around 30 children to 60,000 children. But some historians say that in the time of Christ, there were only a little more than a thousand people living in Bethlehem… so the figure of around 30 children massacred would not be farfetched.

Exactly 15-days ago, in the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, Adam Lanza, a mentally deranged young man, pulled out his mother’s automatic pistols and shot and killed 20 innocent school children, including 6 adult teachers working in the school in what was considered one of the most dastardly mass killings in the United States. Even President Barrack Obama shed tears upon making a nationwide speech.

This brought Americans to ask, “Why?” In a caricature I read over the Internet, the same question was asked of God, on why He wasn’t in the elementary school to stop the killings? God then responded, “That’s because you threw me out of your classrooms so you won’t offend those who do not believe in Me.” So it is time to ask ourselves, do we directly or indirectly participate in the killing of the innocents? If you were supporting the RH Bill, especially those congressmen and women who pushed for the RH Bill, whenever a fetus is forcibly removed from the womb through any artificial means, the blood of innocent children are in your hands and you have become another Herod. That includes those who didn’t do anything so evil could prosper.

*  *  *

Email: [email protected]