Rejoice! God exists and He is with us.

Every year on Dec. 28 the Roman Catholic Church celebrates the Feast of the Holy Innocents – martyrs to Herod’s determination to eliminate male competitors. Herod committed lots of crimes against humanity, and this one is considered one of his lesser ones, since no one knows exactly how many boys under the age of 2 were murdered. The guesses range from six to 144,000. In her visions of the life of Christ, Anna Catherine Emmerich states that she saw that the children of neighboring towns of Bethlehem were also included.

These young boys are considered “the first buds of the church killed by the frost of persecution” (Catholic Encyclopedia). For us today they are a vivid reminder that the horrors of abortion have plenty of precedents and that by the numbers alone, such evil and persecution are now worse. The Holy Innocents were simply children who were inconvenient. To Herod, their humanity was secondary to their status of being undesirable. This is exactly the status we today have assigned children in the womb, who until their parents decide to love them and claim them for their own are simply known as fetuses, blobs of tissue without rights, slaves to our whim and sacrificial victims to our irresponsibility.

The good news is that there is no ordinary crime that cannot be forgiven. God is with us and knows our weaknesses. If you cannot believe in God, still you should not support or tolerate abortion, since life comes before liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

On Tuesday, Jan. 21, Archbishop Sartain will celebrate a Mass for Life in Olympia, and afterward I and others of our parish will enter the March for Life to the state capital. Join us.

— Charles B. Lovekin