Our People

Homily for the Feast of the Holy Innocents 2005 Kellyville

By Most Rev. Anthony Fisher OP
Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney
28/12/2005

There is much sentimentality surrounding Christmas, both in the secular world and the Church. Images abound of a smultzy Holy Family with Jesus in a Franciscian crib surrounded by assorted Franciscian farm animals, carolling angels and gift-bearing shepherds and kings, all set against a backdrop of Christmas trees, santa snow and tinsel. There is a brutal realism about the Gospel, however, when in the middle of all the romance, the astonishing good news of God-made-man for us, the angels singing Gloria, we find things not quite as they ought to be. There is suspicion about the pregnancy; the husband considers divorcing his wife; a mother nearing labour is required to travel a great distance; there no room at the motel for them; the child is delivered amidst the squalor in a cowshed; and Simeon in the Temple warns the proud parents of trouble ahead for the rest of their lives. Not much romance in all that!

Now we read of the plot to kill the baby Jesus by a bloodthirsty, power-crazed king. The Holy Family flee as refugees to a strange land. In the very midst of the Good News of peace on earth, there is murder and intrigue. The backdrop to the Light who has dawned for us at Christmas is in fact darkness. The Way, the Truth and the Life has come into a world that has lost its way, into a civilisation of lies, into a culture of death, which knows him not. On the opening page of our New Testament the blood of the innocent child martyrs is shed. And as the story progresses it build to a crescendo at which the powers of this world will at last catch the One they have been after since today. The very One who has been chased from his birth by Herod and his minions. The very One who is the object of our deepest longings and our darkest fears. The very One whom we will hail in turn with Hosanna in the Highest and Crucify Him, crucify Him.

Our world today is every bit as much ambiguous and confused as it was at the first Christmas. There is plenty of talk of human rights, the dignity of the person, equal respect and care. We are replete with resources, technology and know-how to help people through troubled times. Yet ours is a world where the blood of innocent children still flows: children in war, the slave trade, the drug trade, children who starve every minute in a world which has more than enough food for all, children who are neglected to death in our hospitals for the terrible fault of being born less than ‘perfect’ as this world sees it. Perhaps most horribly of all, there are unborn children who are never allowed to see the light of day. More of them are slaughtered worldwide each year than were killed in all the wars of history put together. The womb has become the most dangerous place for an Australian to live, more dangerous than living on the M2. In our country one in three  women now has an abortion at some time in her life-time and many of those women are damaged physically, psychologically, emotionally and/or spiritually. Women whose hearts are terminated along with their children’s lives. Women whom we all know and love. They are the second victims of the terrible plague of abortion.

In the week before Christmas, the Lockhart Report proposed a whole new raft of pseudo-medical horrors: the cloning of human beings so that they can be killed for their parts; the crossing of humans and animals; the creation of embryos with multiple parents or only one. The ‘expert’ Committee suggested that we redefine beginning of life so that we won’t feel too queasy about doing this. We need only say ‘they are not embryos for the first day or so’ and that they are not ‘protected embryos’ for the first two weeks. Indeed the most chilling part of the report was the suggestion that we think of embryos merely as ‘significant entities associated with the purpose of having babies’ or as mere ‘cellular extensions’ of adults. We have a report then, lacking both scientific and philosophical credibility, full of inconsistencies and false conclusions, recommending profoundly unethical practices, which in many ways symbolises the mess our culture is in with respect to human life and the dangerous paths ahead for us.

To such a world comes an extraordinary gift in the Child Jesus. It is a mind-blowing thing to contemplate: the Creator-become-creature, the Word of God mute in the womb, the Incarnate God’s first word to the world the cry of a newborn baby. The Lord of the Universe is a helpless newborn. It is no wonder that Catholics are notorious for their love of children, their respect for human life from conception until death, their love for parenthood and families. Our God is, especially in this Christmas season, is celebrated precisely as a baby.

Today we also celebrate the first Christian martyrs. They were not heroic prophets like John the Baptist or clerics like Stephen, John the Divine and Thomas a’ Becket, whose bloody witness also paints this week. No: these little ones were not proudly professing their faith as they died. They were simply little children, who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time like babies doomed to abortion, like embryos in Lockhart’s labs. And these ones died in the place of Christ, before Christ died for them.

In celebrating them today we do three things. First, we recommit our hearts and minds to the dignity of the human person at all stages of life from conception to death, saved by a God who became one of us in all our fragility and vulnerability, who entered into the human mess in all its ambiguity.

Secondly, we pray and we promise to keep praying and doing penance and offering sacrifice and demonstrating and lobbying and otherwise working to make our community one after the model of St Joseph, who protected the little child and the mother too. We seek to ensure that parenthood and childhood are reverenced. We want women supported through every stage of their pregnancy and child-rearing. And we seek to bring those women who are victims of abortion back from shame through repentance to healing and a new life.

And last, we commit ourselves to the care of the Holy Innocents. We ask their intercession that all those children who have died without seeing the light of day may yet do so. We ask that through the blood and prayers of the Holy Innocents these little ones might see the eternal light that dawned at Christmas.