Holy Innocents

Matthew 2 says that Herod, tricked by the magi and terrified of a rival king, sent and killed all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, according to the time he had learned from the magi. Joseph, warned in a dream, had already taken the child and his mother to Egypt. Rachel, the prophet says, weeps for her children and refuses to be comforted. The Church calls these children the Holy Innocents. They did not confess with their lips. They died because a tyrant was hunting Christ, and Christ had been among them. Augustine and the later liturgy treat that death as a martyrdom by blood, a baptism of blood, in which the children bear witness by their bodies to a king they could not name.

The feast falls inside the octave of Christmas, three days after the Nativity, with Stephen the protomartyr on the 26th and John the theologian of the Word on the 27th. The old sermon that sets the three side by side is still the best map of the octave: Stephen died because he willed it and confessed, John willed it and was spared, the Innocents did not will it and died. Christmas is immediately followed by the cost of Christmas. Herod is not a footnote to the cards. He is the world’s answer to the child, and Matthew refuses to end chapter 2 without him.

December 28 is a feast, in red, the color of martyrs. The Gloria is said because of the feast and because of the octave. It is not a holy day of obligation. The current Roman Missal uses red, not the violet of some older books, which had dressed the day in penance because the children were unbaptized. The reform judges them as martyrs and clothes them accordingly. Their feast is not a requiem. It is a feast of witnesses. The Church does not thereby declare a theory of the fate of every unbaptized infant. She honors these children, killed for Christ’s sake, and she sings.

The number of the dead is not given by Matthew. Later estimates that speak of thousands, or of a vast massacre easily visible to Roman historians, go beyond the text. Bethlehem was a small town. The horror does not require a large statistic to be horror. What the Gospel emphasizes is the intention: every boy of that age, so that the one boy would not escape. The Holy Family does escape. The other families do not. The feast will not let the Church enjoy the escape and forget the graves. Rachel still weeps. The liturgy weeps with her and then calls the children the first fruits of the martyrs, because the Lamb was among them.

The first reading is often 1 John on love, or Revelation’s hundred and forty-four thousand who follow the Lamb. The Gospel is Matthew 2:13–18, the flight into Egypt and the slaughter. The prayers call the Innocents martyrs who proclaimed the glory of God not by speaking but by dying. The Alleluia is sung. A parish that turns the day into a funeral for innocence in the abstract, without reading Matthew, has replaced the feast with a theme.