On the fourth day of the Christmas Octave, Fr Paul Gooley reads from the Gospel of Matthew (2: 13-18) in which tells of the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt to escape the wrath of Herod. After reading the Gospel, Fr Paul shares a little about the Feast of the Holy Innocents, which we celebrate today. Fr Paul says the Holy Innocents are the children who were slaughtered at the orders of King Herod, in the hope that by killing every boy born in Bethlehem at the same time as Jesus, he would succeed in killing the new-born King of the Jews. There was nothing about those baby boys that made them deserve death. if we looked at any one of them, we would see that they had no chance to do anything, or be anyone, or become anyone. They had done nothing. The Holy Innocents stand, therefore, for the “unimportant” and “unnecessary” pawns, child and adult alike, that permeate the whole of human history, the ones who can be sacrificed for some greater cause because they “do not really matter”. The feast of the Holy Innocents reminds us that in God’s eyes, that is, according to the true value of things, no-one is unimportant, no-one is unnecessary, no-one “doesn’t really matter.” However meaningless their lives and deaths may seem to us, they shine glorious in heaven. On a more personal level, the honour given to these children reminds us that if we suffer or even die for God’s sake, it has value even if we have little or no say in it ourselves. Today, Fr Paul invites us to ask, ‘The Holy Innocents…Pray for us!’.