• The Holy Innocents (1). Martyr. (Current, Traditional)

HEROD, who was reigning in Judea at the time of the birth of Our Saviour, having heard that the Wisemen had come from the East to Jerusalem in search of the king of the Jews, was troubled. He called together the chief priests, and learning that Christ was to be born in Bethlehem, he told the Wisemen: “When you have found him, bring me word again, that I also may come and adore him.” But God having warned them in a dream not to return, they went back to their homes another way. St. Joseph, too, was ordered in his sleep to “take the Child and His mother and fly into Egypt.” When Herod found that the Wisemen did not return, he was furious, and ordered that every male child in Bethlehem and its vicinity of the age of two and under should be slain. These innocent victims were the flowers and the first-fruits of His martyrs, and triumphed over the world, without having ever known it or experienced its dangers.

REFLECTION: How few perhaps of these children, if they had lived, would have escaped the dangers of the world! What snares, what sins, what miseries were they preserved from! So we often lament as misfortunes many accidents which in the designs of heaven are the greatest mercies.

WORD OF THE DAY

SUFFERING. The disagreeable experience of soul that comes with the presence of evil or the privation of some good. Although commonly synonymous with pain, suffering is rather the reaction to pain, and in this sense suffering is a decisive factor in Christian spirituality. Absolutely speaking, suffering is possible because we are creatures, but in the present order of Providence suffering is the result of sin having entered the world. Its purpose, however, is not only to expiate wrongdoing, but to enable the believer to offer God a sacrifice of praise of his divine right over creatures, to unite oneself with Christ in his sufferings as an expression of love, and in the process to become more like Christ, who, having joy set before him, chose the Cross, and thus "to make up all that has still to be undergone by Christ for the sake of His body, the Church" (I Colossians 1:24). (Etym. Latin sufferre, to sustain, to bear up: sub-, up from under + ferre, to bear.)

Modern Catholic Dictionary, Fr. John Hardon SJ (Get the real one at Eternal Life — don’t accept an abridged or edited version of this masterpiece!)

Christmastide Meditations

Daily devotional meditations on the Birth of Our Savior and Christmastide: The Foster-father & The Music of Heaven – Christmas Meditation Day 4 (Dec 28)