4th Day of Christmas: Holy Innocents and Babies Saved by Christmas Carols

  Today, the 4th Day of Christmas, is the Feast of the Holy Innocents, which commemorates the slaughter of all male children in Bethlehem under two years old by King Herod's soldiers.  Herod had learned from the Magi that the Messiah had been born in Bethlehem, and feared that this Messiah would depose him.  As it happened, the Messiah (Jesus) escaped, and Herod went to his eternal reward (whatever that may have been) while Jesus was still an infant. You can read my post on the Holy Innocents (and Holy Innocence) HERE at Nisi Dominus.

Massacre of the Holy Innocents, Ludovico Mazzolino

    My post on the other site explores the ramifications of this terrible event in more detail, including its reflection in the modern day abortion industry and our pornified culture. Here I would like to focus briefly on the connection of the Holy Innocents to an article on Lifesitenews.com [Dec. 23rd, 2016], “Pro-life Christmas carolers save six babies in Orlando, more in other areas by touching hearts with their singing”.  The article details some amazing rescues, not only in Florida, but across the country:

Pro-Life Action League Executive Director Eric Scheidler described for LifeSiteNews how three different couples turned around and walked away from abortion this year as carolers sang outside Family Planning Associates abortion center in San Bernardino, California.

A compelling feature of the story is that the Christmas Carols themselves seem to have been the decisive factor in changing the minds of people who had come to the clinics intent on aborting a child:

. . . At least one couple was greatly moved by the hymns.

“What impressed me about this report is they actually stopped to tell the caroler group that they changed their mind,” Scheidler stated.

“The couple told them, ‘It was because of your caroling that we decided to keep our baby,’” he said. “The singing was the only thing that happened to change their mind.”

A group in Illinois reports similar results:

"We're having a baby! We changed our minds," a woman called out joyfully to Northwest Families for Life group caroling Tuesday, December 20, in conjunction with Pro-Life Action League’s “Peace in the Womb” Caroling Days in Wood Dale, Ill.

When they met the couple at the car, the group’s co-founder, Maria Goldstein, told LifeSiteNews, the man said to them with a big smile on his face, "Thank you. You're doing a great job!"  

“What exactly was the "great job" we did?” Goldstein said. “We didn't counsel them on the way in; we didn't talk them out of the abortion; we weren't able to show them pictures of developing babies.”  

“All we did was show up, pray, and sing,” she continued. “Maybe they heard our carols inside and felt God tug at their hearts. I guess that really is a "great job!" We got to bring the power of God to this dark place. God is good.”

    God is indeed good.  These stories of the babies saved by carolers cast an interesting light on both the Nativity of Jesus and today’s Feast of the Holy Innocents.  The Incarnation and Nativity came about because, while our efforts are necessary  - “faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead” (James 2:17) - they are not sufficient.  In the end, we can’t save ourselves, or anyone else, all by ourselves: only the power of God can do that.  In the Life Site story, the Holy Spirit working through sacred Christmas songs changed hearts that were not moved by human arguments.

    The fate of the children killed by Herod’s soldiers in Bethlehem likewise illustrates this point.  Nobody was able to save them from unjust slaughter, they were too young to have any intellectual knowledge of God, and, since Jesus himself was still a baby, baptism was not available to them.  And yet the Church assures us that these little ones did not die in vain, and that they enjoy the reward of Heaven (you can read a short, concise explanation here). They were beyond the help of human agency, but “with God, all things are possible” (Matthew 19:26).  If we do our part, God will do the rest.

    An interesting aside: at one time, the story of these poor murdered children itself inspired a large number of songs.  The best known today (the only one, to my knowledge, that is still regularly performed) is The "Coventry Carol" (lyrics below), dating from the 16th century.  The spare, hauntingly beautiful rendition in the clip below is performed by Valeria Mignaco and Alfonso Marin.

1. Lullay, Thou little tiny Child,
By, by, lully, lullay.
Lullay, Thou little tiny Child.
By, by, lully, lullay.

2. O sisters, too, how may we do,
For to preserve this day;
This poor Youngling for whom we sing,
By, by, lully, lullay.

3. Herod the King, in his raging,
Charged he hath this day;
His men of might, in his own sight,
All children young, to slay.

4. Then woe is me, poor Child, for Thee,
And ever mourn and say;
For Thy parting, nor say nor sing,
By, by, lully, lullay.
Lully, lulla, thou little tiny child,
By by, lully lullay.

Why Jeopardy Doesn't Know Judas

Who is that guy, and why is he kissing Jesus?

     Sometimes a single detail captures and gives flesh to something much larger.  For instance, today a person of my acquaintance (a non-Catholic Christian) told me with evident disgust that he recently saw a television quiz show in which not one of three contestants could name the betrayer of Jesus.  Just think about that.  What do you think the odds were forty years ago of picking three reasonably well educated adults in the United States at random and finding that none of them could name Judas Iscariot?  We might in fact have been mildly surprised (at least) to find even one such person, because the Christian worldview, and the Christian story, had been so deeply embedded in the culture for so long that even the non-religious and non-Christians generally had a pretty good idea of the major players in the Biblical drama. No longer.

     Lest you think I’m just another old-timer pining the “good old days” that never were, take a look at this recent report, “Five Trends Among The Unchurched”, from the Barna Group, a Christian-oriented research firm.  Barna’s five trends are that 1) “Secularization is on the Rise”, which is to say that each generation is not simply less religious in terms of numbers, but also more radically separated from religion; 2) “People Are Less Open to the Idea of Church”, as measured by the number of unchurched who are open to appeals from their believing fellow citizens; 3) “Churchgoing Is No Longer Mainstream”: the percentage of Americans who have never attended church regularly increased by more than 50%, from 15% of the adult population to 23% of the adult population, from 1993 to 2013; 4) “There Are Different Expectations of Church Involvement”, or more simply people are much less clear on what “church-going” is all about, including the importance of Sunday worship, or staying in a particular faith community; 5) “There Is Skepticism about Churches’ Contribution to Society”, as Barna explains:

Although many of the churchless hold positive views of churches, a substantial number also have no idea what Christians have accomplished in the nation, either for the better or for the worse.  When the unchurched were asked to describe what they believe are the positive and negative contributions of Christianity in America, almost half (49%) could not identify a single favorable impact of the Christian community, while nearly two-fifths (37%) were not able to identify a single negative impact.

Overall, Barna’s report paints a picture of a society that is increasingly “indifferent” to religion, comprised of a growing number of people who live unaware of any religious dimension to their lives, and who don’t perceive any need for it. Moreover, while most unchurched people today have at least some knowledge of, and experience with, Christian belief, the report shows that with every generation we are seeing more and more people with no direct connection to Christianity at all.  As I said a few years ago in an essay I wrote for Catholic Exchange:

Our civilization has been shaped by Christianity for almost two thousand years.  Christian beliefs, attitudes, and moral convictions (commonly referred to as the Judeo-Christian worldview) are woven into all of our customs and institutions . . . anyone raised in the West over the last two millennia has been formed, to a large degree, by that Christocentric worldview, whether they consciously embrace it or not.  More than one commentator has remarked that even the “new atheists” such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have not jettisoned principles such as the dignity of the human person (not a universal value by any stretch) or a Judeo-Christian concept of justice – they employ these very ideas, in fact, as weapons against Christianity . . . Without its source and foundation of Christian belief, however, the worldview itself will quickly wither . . . a society that abandons faith will soon be resubmerged in paganism.

The loss of that worldview will have a profound impact (what we have seen so far is just the beginning).  In his eye-opening book Who Really Cares Arthur C. Brooks copiously documents the fact that believing Christians are not just more generous, but much more generous, of both their time and their treasure than other people, and correspondingly more honest, courteous, etc.  Any objective observer would have to conclude, based on the data, that a less Christian society would be proportionally less generous, honest, and courteous.  Not only that, but people who are so disconnected from any experience of religion at all, and perceive no need for any religious dimension in their life, are going to be much harder to evangelize. At the same time, greater efforts at evangelization will be necessary, because our Western Society, which at one time could with some amount of truth be called Christendom, is quickly reverting to Mission Territory.

     Evangelizing a neo-pagan culture presents a very different challenge than did the conversion of the original pagans.  The ancient pagans found Christianity to be strange, and sometimes counterintuitive (“love your enemies” [Matthew 5:44] is still tough for us to swallow), but the neo-pagans believe that Christianity has been tried and found wanting, and most of what they hear from the media and popular culture is negative, which is why barely half of the unchurched people cited above could think of a single good thing the Church has done, while almost two-thirds could think of something bad.  We need to work as never before at being “wise as serpents and as innocent as doves” (Matthew 10:16), to be that city on a hill (Matthew 5:14) without looking like hypocrites, to preach without “preaching”.  How to do that I don’t know, except that we’ll get nowhere without prayer, the sacraments (especially Confession and the Eucharist . . . and Confession), and a firm reliance on God’s Providence.  Lord, have mercy on us.