Today is the feast of St. Thomas Becket who was martyred on this day in 1170. His martyrdom reminds us that secular fundamentalism is not a new phenomenon.

T. S. Eliot’s “Murder in the Cathedral” tells the story of Becket’s defiance of secularism in terms that accentuate the perennial nature of the conflict between Church and State, between religion and politics, between the things that are God’s and those which are Caesar’s. And let’s not forget that yesterday was the feast of the Holy Innocents, a timely reminder that the innocent have always suffered at the hands of sinners. Indeed, the greatest tragedy of sin is not the suffering that it brings to the sinner but the pain that it causes to the innocent. The archetype of the innocent victim of sin is of course the crucified Christ but the Holy Innocents, butchered by secularism in the wake of Christ’s birth, serve as prophets of the doom that awaited the Christ Child on the Mount Doom of Golgotha.

Readers of the St. Austin Review will be reminded perhaps of the painting of the massacre of the innocents that adorned the cover of our recent issue on the theme of “religion and politics” (Sept/Oct). The selection of such a painting for such a theme makes the important connection between the destruction and deadliness of secularism, whether it be the worldliness of Herod or the wickedness of Hitler. Today, of course, we can’t think of the Holy Innocents, the newborns butchered by secularism, without thinking of those other innocents, the unborn butchered by abortion. In the darkness of these thoughts, we should point an accusing finger at Margaret Sanger, the racist founder of Planned Parenthood, who sought, like Hitler, to exterminate the untermenschen. Not only did Sanger hope that abortion would reduce the number of black people in the world, a hope that has been fulfilled by Planned Parenthood’s success in persuading a disproportionate number of black women to kill their babies, but she and all proponents of abortion believe that the unborn are literally untermenschen, that they are subhuman and can be destroyed at whim. The fact that this sick and sickening contempt for unborn babies flies in the face of the evidence of both science and religion does not deter the abortionists who are blinded by the ideology of the culture of death.

Enough of such darkness. Let’s rejoice at the paradoxical placing of the twin feasts of St. Thomas Becket and the Holy Innocents within the octave of Christmas, the most joyful season of the Christian year. The birth of Jesus points to His Death and to the Resurrection and the Life beyond His Death. The holy martyrs and the holy innocents share in Christ’s resurrection as they had shared in His Death. We don’t mourn the great St. Thomas Becket, we pray to him; we don’t despair at the death of the Holy Innocents because we know that they have been raised from the dead. The whole delightful paradox is summed up in four succinct lines from “The Holly and the Ivy”, one of my favourite Christmas carols:

The holly bears a berry
As red as any blood
And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ
To do poor sinners good.