The Holy Innocents

The Holy Innocents, kept in the West on 28 December (29 December in the Byzantine calendar), commemorates the male children of Bethlehem killed on the order of Herod in his attempt to destroy the newborn Christ, an episode recounted only in Matthew's Gospel. Christian tradition honours them as martyrs, the first to die for Christ though without knowing him, and the feast's liturgy holds together the joy of Christmastide with the shadow of violence, keeping it within the Christmas octave rather than at a distance from it.

Historically the massacre is not otherwise attested, and scholars debate whether it is a historical event or a theological narrative shaped to echo Pharaoh's killing of the Hebrew infants and to present Jesus as a new Moses; the number of victims, greatly inflated in later legend, has no basis in the text, which implies a small village. In the medieval calendar the day was marked by inversions of order, the boy bishop and the "Feast of Fools", and in the modern period the Innocents have been widely taken up as patrons of children and invoked in reflection on the killing of the innocent.

In recent decades, some Catholic parishes, dioceses and pro-life organisations, particularly in the United States, have adopted the Holy Innocents feast as an occasion for prayer vigils, memorial services and public commemoration connected to opposition to legal abortion, drawing an explicit parallel between the biblical account of Herod's killing of children and their own view of abortion as the killing of the innocent in the present day, a modern application of the feast's ancient theme that is promoted by specific advocacy groups and by bishops sympathetic to that cause rather than being a universally observed or uncontested part of the feast's meaning across the whole Catholic Church.

This contemporary application sits alongside, rather than replacing, the feast's older and more general historic association with the protection and patronage of children broadly, and Catholics who mark the day do so with varying emphases, some focused specifically on the abortion debate and others keeping the day in its older and more general register as a commemoration of violence against children and an occasion of sympathy for child victims of violence in the world generally, without any single interpretation being formally mandated by the church's own liturgical texts for the day.