Next weekend, we celebrate the Three Wise Men and their visit to the Christ child. Today, we commemorate an event that occurred in conjunction with the visit of the Wise Men and their interaction with Herod - the Holy Innocents. This event is recorded in the second chapter of Matthew’s Gospel that we hear this morning, when Herod felt he had been deceived by the Wise Men, so he had all boys two years and younger in the vicinity of Bethlehem killed. The Greek tradition hold that Herod had 14,000 boys killed. The Syrian tradition has that number at 64,000. Medieval authors put the number at 144,000. However, we will never know. Modern scholars, who assert that Bethlehem was a small town at the time, put the number at less than 100. Jewish historians did not record this exact event, but it is known that Herod committed many terrible atrocities in the last years of his reign. The holy Church venerates these children killed as martyrs. St Augustin asserted in a holy that they died not only for Christ, but also died in his place. The Latin rite of our Church instituted this feast sometime in the fourth and fifth centuries. Traditions passes down that the remains of some of the Holy Innocents are buried in St Paul’s basilica just outside of the ancient walls of the city of Rome. May we in the Church work for peace and justice so that no innocent killing such as this will happen again.
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