Ireland's Holy Innocents

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No aborted child deserves to have been killed.

That those children are alive from the moment of conception is without doubt, that they have a right to live independent of the will of any human being is without doubt and that they are as dignified as those humans who emerge from the womb without suffering their brutal fate is also without doubt.

Why then, are they treated with the disdain and debasement normally reserved for criminality?

At Christmas, the world celebrates the birth of Christ with rightful joy. The accompanying feeling to that joy and consolation can often be cloaked in nostalgia and sentimentality. Sentimental is one thing that the Gospel account of Our Lord’s birth certainly is not. The Christmas that we grow up with might tell us that it is, but it is far from it.

He is born in the dead of winter, in a cave, rejected from everywhere. His birth is followed by the need the flee into exile. The events that he leaves behind are brutal and violent, Herod’s murder of the Holy Innocents, those children to him who could very well be the Messiah that threatens his own vainly held power.  

The New Testament is full of wicked violence. Against Stephen, against John the Baptist and against Our Lord Himself. People can be quite forgetful of just how vicious people became towards anyone close to Jesus in the Gospels. Be that in proximity, in love or in innocence.

As Herod ordered the Holy Innocents to be murdered in order that he may keep his authority, so too have others manifested their love for themselves and their hatred for Christ into the persecution of the most innocent amongst us. In the United States, there have been 60 million or so abortions since the early 1970s. In the United Kingdom, around 2 out of 5 abortions are by women getting more than their first. In China, the family unit is the perennial threat to the almighty State, to such an extent that their one child policy led to a deficit of 40 million female babies who had been aborted through sex selective abortion.

This exhaustive list and the terror towards the unborn seem to be slowing down until events in May led to a new front for those depraved who wish to see the unborn child suffer at the hands of those who should be protecting them.

In Ireland, the campaign to remove the right to life for the unborn child unleashed an undercurrent of hatred and resentment that masked itself under anything from compassion to healthcare to ironically enough, human rights.

Real moments of the Repeal the 8th campaign though, were beyond the superficial ‘human rights activist’ veneer and instead were steeped in a humourless disdain towards anyone who has ever even made a sign of the Cross with earnestness. You would not hesitate to call the behaviour of many of those people ‘demonic’. Many in those mad months chose to embrace a darkness from which their souls will never recover. Cultural Catholicism in Ireland died on May 26th and in the events leading up to it.

It is often said that there are cases where Satanists have a belief in the real presence more so than some Catholics even do, with their emphasis on stealing consecrated hosts proving their belief that Christ is truly in the Eucharist. So too can it be said, that there were many pro abortion campaigners who had a great belief in the rituals and sacraments of the Church and sought to hurt them during the referendum.

One was the mother who pinned a pro abortion badge onto her daughter’s first Holy Communion dress and shared the image with giddy pride.

Then there were the activists who placed a pro abortion sweater on an altar within a Dublin Church.

And finally came even a Satanic ritual performed inside of Dublin’s main bus station at rush hour, entitled ‘The Renunciation’ wherein a deliberately blasphemous play was performed in which the Virgin Mary renounced giving birth to Christ and instead had Him aborted.

Irish people tend to think of themselves as light hearted, easy going and as the world’s favourite little brothers. But that endearment dissipated with the worldwide revulsion at the orgy of obedience by Ireland’s young people towards their leaders at Dublin Castle on May 26th. As a government which has created a homeless crisis, an emigration crisis and a hospital crisis stood on the stage to celebrate the removal of the right to life of unborn children, a generation of sycophants cheered on the assured dwindling fortunes of both themselves and their descendants.

Why such support? Get your Rosaries off my Ovaries. If I wanted the Church in my p**sy I’d f**k a priest. Just some of the home made signs carried by the generation yet to protest their own inabilities to afford a home or raise a family on a reasonable income. They offer a clue.

And so too does the Gospel account of the Holy Innocents.

The unborn of Ireland in 2018 were invariably described as a parasite, as a runny period by one Irish politician on tv, as a helpless creature at the mercy of one who wished to exercise ‘choice’.

Unborn children exist to impinge upon the freedom of women we were told.

That pursuit of pleasure and power not withstanding, there was another more glaring reason.

Motivating them also was the compulsion of many to use the unborn, to attack the innocent like Herod did, in order to get to Christ. By provoking and hurting the unborn, many felt that they were hurting the Catholic Church, in no way realising that taunts about the treatment of children in the past by the Church only served to incriminate them alongside those whom they accuse. They scream about Tuam, not it seems out of upset because of what happened there, but rather because they wish to have unmarked burials of their own children.

The Irish government have tried to twist the knife since, by voting to make sure that unborn babies would not receive pain relief in abortion, would not receive assistance if born alive in a botched abortion and most hypocritically of all in light of the cultural obsession with Tuam, that they would not even be entitled to a burial once their lives had been extinguished under the now unrecognisable tricolour for which many loving men and women died in order to ‘cherish the children of the nation equally’.

In supporting abortion, Irish people have hoped to sieze imagined cultural power and ‘property portfolios’ (in strange political parlance) from the Church.

Instead, all they have adopted is a legacy of Ireland’s children (3,000 homeless and counting) being pawns to those who wish to preserve their own power.

It was written by Joseph Sobran 30 years ago that ‘We are expected to trust politicians (who themselves are not to be confused with Mother Teresa of Calcutta) to act more compassionately than we ourselves would in the normal course of life’.

Those who doused themselves in the mantras of Compassion and Choice believe in and practise anything but.

Christ’s presence in the world allows us to see the true nature of a man’s heart. For some He is how the weak show themselves to be strong while for others He brings about anger and hatred.

So too do the vulnerable, the sick, the weak. In Ireland, there is a government who despise all three. And there were 66% of voters in May who were either grossly indifferent or viscerally hateful towards them. 

In their fear of the unborn, we note and ask as Fulton Sheen did: Totalitarians are fond of saying that Christianity is the enemy of the State—a euphemistic way of saying an enemy of themselves. Herod was the first totalitarian to sense this; he found Christ to be his enemy before He was two years old. Could a Babe born under the earth in a cave shake potentates and kings?

In the story of the Holy Innocents, Herod wants the children dead lest they become a nuisance towards his love of pleasure and power.

Every child, aborted or spared, is innocent.

The fittingly numbered 33% of Irish voters who voted against abortion can hold their heads high.

The fittingly numbered 66% , not so much.

For the coming suffering of the Holy Innocents of Ireland, we must do much penance, offer what protection we can and above all, pray.

The demons also, in that first festival of Christmas, feasted after their own fashion. ....Herod had his place, therefore, in the miracle play of Bethlehem because he is the menace to the Church Militant and shows it from the first as under persecution and fighting for its life. For those who think this a discord, it is a discord that sounds simultaneously with the Christmas bells. For those who think the idea of the Crusade is one that spoils the idea of the Cross, we can only say that for them the idea of the Cross is spoiled; the idea of the Cross is spoiled quite literally in the cradle.

G.K. Chesterton - Everlasting Man