Message of Abbot Paul - Wednesday 28th December 2022
Abbot Paul • December 27, 2022
Yesterday I recalled a Christmas Day spent 36 years’ ago in Peru. How time flies. As today is the feast of the Holy Innocents, I thought I might share with you another experience to do with babies, one of so many. I should have written a book of my experiences in Peru. Now I’m beginning to forget. This took place in the village of Sinchi Roca in the so-called Valle de los Incas (Valley of the Incas). It was a community usually served by Fr David, although he was often indisposed. They had a monthly Mass on the first Monday of the month. On one occasion, as I arrived, I could see a great deal of commotion in the first row of benches. I asked the chief catechist what was going on and he replied, “They’ve brought two dead babies, twins, to be baptised before they bury them.” I explained how we couldn’t baptise the dead, only the living, and these tiny babies in shoeboxes we no more than small skeletons with greenish yellow skin and lifeless eyes. The mother was sick at home, the father so poor he didn’t have shoes, it was a tragic but common situation. I was tired and harassed, I’d had a very busy weekend, I didn’t express much sympathy, I confess. I sprinkled a drop of water on each baby, said I baptise you without much devotion or enthusiasm and told the father to take them to the cemetery at once for burial. I then said Mass, did what I had to do, went on to the next village and never gave the incident another thought. It happened all the time.
The following month, I went again to Sinchi Roca only to be greeted with even more noise than the last time. I asked the catechist, “And now what have you got for me, a surprise wedding?” “No, padrecito Pablo,” he said, “it’s the babies you baptised last month.” “What d’you mean, those babies, they were dead?” “They were, padrecito, and certified by the posta medica, but when they went to bury them, first one, then the other moved an eye, and padre, look at them now.” I couldn’t believe my eyes, two of the bonniest babies I’d ever seen, and now with both parents and rich godparents from the city, who had obviously paid for a big fiesta. I was in shock. Everyone was saying that I was a living saint for healing the babies and bringing them back to life. But it was quite clear to me, and I preached about it, that they were the saints, especially the poor father, who had so insisted I baptise his babies. They were the ones with faith, the ones who didn’t doubt that God can work miracles and God had rewarded their faith. That happened in 1984 and those boys are now 38 years’ old. That sort of thing happened so often. It was in Peru and with those simple Peruvian country folk that I discovered what faith is and I thank God for it.
On this feast of the Holy Innocents, we pray for recently born babies everywhere, for their good health and that they receive the gift of faith through baptism. Let us also pray for those babies who are not given a chance to live, but whose lives are terminated in the womb. That they will enjoy the glory of heaven and the gift of eternal life. And we pray for their mothers.
Here is the Gospel, from Matthew, (Mt 2: 8-13):
“After the wise men had left, the angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, ‘Get up, take the child and his mother with you, and escape into Egypt, and stay there until I tell you, because Herod intends to search for the child and do away with him.’ So Joseph got up and, taking the child and his mother with him, left that night for Egypt, where he stayed until Herod was dead. This was to fulfil what the Lord had spoken through the prophet:
I called my son out of Egypt.
Herod was furious when he realised that he had been outwitted by the wise men, and in Bethlehem and its surrounding district he had all the male children killed who were two years old or under, reckoning by the date he had been careful to ask the wise men. It was then that the words spoken through the prophet Jeremiah were fulfilled:
A voice was heard in Ramah,
sobbing and loudly lamenting:
it was Rachel weeping for her children,
refusing to be comforted because they were no more”.
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