Feast day: December 28
The Holy Innocents
The little boys of Bethlehem slaughtered by King Herod in his attempt to kill the newborn Christ — the Church's first martyrs, who died for Jesus before they could speak his name.
Within the joyful days of the Christmas octave, on December 28, the Church remembers a dark and terrible scene from the infancy of Jesus: the slaughter of the little boys of Bethlehem by King Herod. The Gospel of Matthew tells how the wise men, seeking the newborn king of the Jews, alerted the jealous and ruthless Herod, who, when the magi did not return to reveal the child's whereabouts, ordered the killing of every boy in Bethlehem two years old and under.
Warned by an angel in a dream, Joseph had already fled with Mary and the child into Egypt, so that Jesus escaped — but the children of the village did not. These are the 'Holy Innocents,' the little ones who died, in a sense, in the place of Christ and because of him, the first to shed their blood for the newborn Savior though they could not yet speak his name or knowingly choose him.
The Church has honored them from very ancient times as martyrs — indeed as a special kind of martyr, who bore witness to Christ not by words or by will but simply by dying for him. An old hymn calls them the 'flowers of the martyrs,' cut down at the dawn of their lives like buds destroyed by the storm before they could bloom, their innocence itself their crown.
Their feast, set so close to Christmas, casts the shadow of the Cross across the joy of the manger, a reminder that the child born at Bethlehem came into a violent world and would himself be put to death. The Holy Innocents are honored as patrons of children, and their day has become, in the modern Church, an occasion of prayer for all children who are the victims of cruelty and of the violence of the powerful.
They are honored as martyrs though they never chose it — children who died in Christ's place, the first to give their lives for him though they never knew him.
Source: newadvent.org/cathen/07419a.htm
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