Holy Innocents: why are we putting 12-year-olds in solitary confinement for 23½ hours a day?
by Martin Sewell, Archbishop Cranmer:
Herod then with fear was filled:
“A prince,” he said, “in Jewry!”
And all the little boys he killed
At Bethl’hem in his fury.
Childermas – the Feast of the Holy Innocents – is rarely referenced, still less observed, in the modern world, and one can scarcely be surprised. Matthew’s short, two-verse reference (2:16-18) is not mirrored in the other gospels, and although one knows that the joy of Christmas will be inevitably short-lived, the massacre of all male children two years old is nevertheless an abrupt interlude in our festivities which can scarcely be expected to find a place in the secular world. Christians should not be surprised that the unpalatable truths are the most easily glossed over even when we are telling the story of redemption.
In former times the Feast of the Holy Innocents marked the day when the Feast of Fools came to an end, and boy bishops surrendered their temporary authority back to the adults. They should have held on to it for an additional day. Until the Council of Basle 1431 condemned such folk practices, it was customary for a return to normality to be marked by children being whipped in bed on the feast day. The practice only finally died out in the 17th century.
The biblical text evokes recollection of the death of the firstborn at Passover, when the Angel of Death passed over Egypt. But it also reminds us that death will follow the birth of the baby Jesus all too soon. These Holy Innocents are, in a sense, the first martyrs for Christ, but tragically have not been the last. Heartlessness toward the very young is one of the most shocking crimes in the eyes of ordinary people: the Auschwitz Memorial tweets a daily image of the victims of the Holocaust to remind us of their individual humanity, but few raise us to anger and sorrow as much as those of the babies whose names I have made a custom to speak on the day of their remembrance. Too many children throughout history have been like the Holy Innocents, ‘known unto God’.
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