Why are we Slaughtering the Healers?

  Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven.

                                        (Matthew 19:14, Ignatius Bible)

Image: Leonardo da Vinci, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

        “It is the little ones who heal us,” said Father Leonard from out of the blue.  I had been confessing some now-forgotten sin when out came this treasure from the storeroom of his heart.

        Some days later it hit me that perhaps the face of God, untainted by sin, is reflected in the face of an innocent child — an untainted image and likeness of God.  This would explain why Jesus said, “In heaven their angels always behold the face of my Father who is in heaven.” (Matt. 18.10)  That is, the faces of the angels’ appointed little ones are so many little faces of God, so many reflections of the face of the Infant Jesus.

         When the Pharisees asked the adult Jesus why He hung around with the likes of us, He answered, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.” (Luke 5:31)  Our spiritual forefathers understood the preciousness of each human life, and thus the infinite value of healing.  How appalled they would have been to breathe the putrid ambience of our brave new world where slithery phrases like ‘freedom of choice,’ ‘women’s health’ and ‘reproductive rights’ mean the wholesale murdering of babies in their mothers’ wombs — and, horror unspeakable — the slaughtering of babies while they are being born, and even after having emerged alive into our world:  murdered by the very ‘physicians’ who should be delivering those newborn healers into their harried mothers’ desperate, loving arms.

       How horrified our forebears would have been by the hissing sound of those three slithery words—‘Freedom of Choice’—that deny both freedom and choice to the little boys and girls being butchered by so-called ‘physicians.’ And how the guardian angels must writhe in holy agony to see their own tiny, Godlike charges torn out of the womb with sharp-toothed steel pincers piece by piece, limb by limb, tiny hands and feet and torso, and, most wrenching of all, the tiny bleeding head with its tortured face of God frozen in eternal agony.  How bitterly the guardians must weep to see us slaughter their beloved, helpless little ones, those tiny healers, as if infanticide really were the merest expression of ‘women’s reproductive rights.’

         If only we could hear the angels gasp or feel the rain of tears they shower over every butchered child. But perhaps we are too far gone, too ‘worldly,’ too hardened of heart, too insensate. Perhaps our consciences’ calluses are long since grown too thick for us to hear or feel such holy pain.  We ourselves are so desperately in need of love, of innocence, of healing.

     How very sick indeed our world will be when we have finally slaughtered all the little ones, all the little healers.

 Luke O’Hara became a Roman Catholic in Japan and writes mostly about Japan’s martyrs. His articles and books can be found at his website, kirishtan.com.