THE FEAST OF HOLY INNOCENTS
Prayer before Mass: Almighty and ever-living God, I approach the sacrament of Your only-begotten Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ. I come sick to the doctor of life, unclean to the fountain of mercy, blind to the radiance of eternal light, and poor and needy to the Lord of heaven and earth. Lord, in Your great generosity, heal my sickness, wash away my defilement, enlighten my blindness, enrich my poverty, and clothe my nakedness. May I receive the Bread of Angels, the King of kings and Lord of lords, with humble reverence, with the purity and faith, the repentance and love, and the determined purpose that will help to bring me to salvation. May I receive the sacrament of the Lord’s Body and Blood, and its reality and power.
Kind God, may I receive the Body of Your only-begotten Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, born from the womb of the Virgin Mary, and so be received into His mystical body and numbered among His members.
Loving Father, as on my earthly pilgrimage I now receive Your beloved Son under the veil of a sacrament, may I one day see Him face to face in glory, who lives and reigns with You forever. Amen. By Knights of the Holy Eucharist.
The blood of Jesus Christ purifies us
all from sin
This is what we have heard from Jesus
Christ, and the
message
that we are announcing to you:
God is light; there is no darkness in him at all.
If we say that we are in union with God
while we are living in darkness, we are lying because we are not living
the truth.
But if we live our lives in the light,
as he is in the light, we are in union with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son,
purifies us from all sin.
If we say we have no sin in us,
we are deceiving ourselves and refusing to admit the truth;
but if we acknowledge our sins, then God who is faithful and just
will forgive our sins and purify us from everything that is wrong.
To say that we have never sinned
is to call God a liar and to show that his word is not in us.
I am writing this, my children,
to stop you sinning; but if anyone should sin,
we have our advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ, who is just;
he is the sacrifice that takes our sins away, and not only ours,
but the whole world’s.
Our life, like a bird, has
escaped from the snare of the fowler
If the Lord had not been on
our side when men rose up against us,
then would they have swallowed
us alive when their anger was kindled.
Then would the waters have
engulfed us, the torrent gone over us;
over our head would have swept the
raging waters.
Indeed the snare has been
broken and we have escaped.
Our help is in the name of the
Lord, who made heaven and earth.
The massacre of
the innocents
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:
sobbing and loudly lamenting:
it was Rachel weeping for her children,
refusing to be comforted because they were no more.
Father, the Holy innocents offered you praise by the death they suffered for Christ. May our lives bear witness to the faith we profess with our lips. We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Pauline Prayer of the Church
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