麻豆社

I live at the Cathedral in the middle of Portsmouth. Portsmouth is a great city and one of the things I like doing in the evenings is going out for a short walk. Walking often helps me to pray. But when you look up, you can鈥檛 see anything of the night sky. The tall buildings, the street lights and shop windows, the car headlights, make the sky black, empty, a void. You鈥檙e lucky to see the moon, let alone any of the stars.

Our busy, materialistic culture, with all the shopping, the work, the noise, the things we have do, is a bit like that. It easily blocks out the sacred canopy of God and the majesty of creation. It can even dull our sense of right and wrong, obscuring the values we ought to hold dear.

Today, the fourth day of Christmas, is the feast of the Holy Innocents. These were the children massacred by King Herod in his attempt to kill the infant Jesus. As St. Matthew鈥檚 Gospel says, Herod was furious the wise men had outwitted him, so he had all the male children, in Bethlehem and its surrounding district, killed, who were two years old or under. The horror of this slaughter is captured in a well-known Christmas carol: This did Herod sore affray, and grievously bewilder; so he gave the word to slay, and slew the little childer.

Our Catholic Diocese covers a large swathe of southern England from south Oxford to the Channel Islands, and for us, Holy Innocents is a Day of Prayer for those who assist with the Ministry of Safeguarding. We ask forgiveness for the wrongs committed in the past and we pray for children and vulnerable adults, for victims of abuse and for all who work to make the Church a safe haven for children and for the vulnerable.

Yet this feast of the Holy Innocents also makes me ask how we safeguard the most vulnerable creature of all, the unborn child in its mother鈥檚 womb: innocent, dependent, defenceless. I pray today for all expectant mothers. But might there not also be prayers for the safety of children in the womb? It always seems strange to me that in a culture saturated with human rights, the rights of the unborn child are at times relativised and overridden. I know this is a divisive issue, but how can we be concerned about nature, climate change and respect for life, if we fail to protect the unborn child? For me, the feast of the Holy Innocents brings that question into sharp focus.

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