The Healing Journey

December 28, 2023

“In our world, we continue to hear the lamentation of so many mothers…”
— Pope Francis

Several years ago, on the Feast of the Holy Innocents, December 28, Pope Francis, said: “Christmas is also accompanied, whether we like it or not, by tears….It is the sobbing of mothers bewailing the death of their children in the face of Herod’s tyranny and unbridled thirst for power. Today, too, we hear this heart-rending cry of pain, which we neither desire nor are able to ignore or to silence. In our world, we continue to hear the lamentation of so many mothers, of so many families, for the death of their children, their innocent children.”

The Church considers the Holy Innocents the first martyrs for Christ. They died for him and instead of him, so he could die for us. They were children slain by King Herod in the Massacre of the Holy Innocents, when he sent his soldiers to find the Christ Child — an estimated 10 to 20 boys whose deaths echo throughout the ages, down to our troubled time.

Artists, from Giotto di Bondone to Angelo Visconti and Peter Paul Rubens, have captured the terror of those horrifying moments when Herod’s soldiers brandished their swords. One work, however, stands apart.

The artist William Holman Hunt, in his painting “Triumph of the Innocents,” depicts the children, traveling with the Christ Child on the flight into Egypt. They process festively around Mary, who is holding Jesus on the donkey as Joseph leads them to Egypt. The Blessed Mother looks lovingly at the celestial infants, while Baby Jesus seems excited by their presence. In the end, death had no power over them because they shared in the glory of the resurrection.

St. Augustine said, “The death of these children is precious in the sight of God … The end of the present life is for them the beginning of glory.”

Is it not so for all children we have lost?

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