Octave Day of the Holy Innocents

Simple (1954 Calendar): January 4th

In an effort to make available the traditional Catholic pre-1955 spirituality, I will be posting the Traditional Mass Propers for the Octave Day of the Holy Innocents, which was traditionally celebrated today. 

This Octave is a Simple Octave, meaning with the reforms of 1911, that only the Feastday and the Octave Day itself was kept. The intra Octave days are not commemorated in the Mass or in the Breviary, which is a departure from the pre-1911 practice where they would have been commemorated in the intervening days.  Those interested in the Breviary for the Octave Day of Holy Innocents as in place before the should click here. 

Dom Gueranger writes in his seminal work on the Liturgical Year for this Octave Day:

"We finish to-day the Octave consecrated to the memory of the Holy Innocents of Bethlehem. Thanks be to God, who has given them to us to be our intercessors and our models! Their name will not reappear on the Church’s Calendar until the return of the Christmas Solemnity; let us therefore devoutly approach these sweet Infant Saints—venerate them, love them, and address to them our farewell prayers.

"The Holy Church, which on the Feast vested in the colour of mourning, and this out of condolence with Rachel’s grief, now on the Octave Day clothes herself in the red of her Martyrs, in order to honour these Babes who shed their Blood for Jesus. Notwithstanding, she is full of tender compassion for those poor Mothers, who suffered such agonies of grief at the sight of the murder of their little ones; she continually alludes to them in to-day’s Liturgy, and reads in the Office of Matins a passage from an ancient Sermon which vividly describes their feelings...

"Among these Children thus cruelly massacred, from the age of two years and under, there were some belonging to those Shepherds of Bethlehem who had been called on the Night of our Saviour's Birth to go and adore him in his Crib. These, after Mary and Joseph the first worshippers of the Incarnate Word, thus offered to the God who had called them the most precious treasure they possessed. They knew to what Child their children were sacrificed, and a holy pride filled their souls as they thought of this new proof of God's singular mercy to them in preference to so many others of their fellowcreatures.

"As to Herod, he was foiled in his schemes, as must ever be the case with those who wage war against Christ and his Church. His edict for the murder of every male child that was two years old or younger, included Bethlehem and its entire neighbourhood; but the Child he alone cared for, and wished to destroy, escaped the sword and fled into Egypt. It was another proof of the world's folly in opposing the designs of God; and, in this instance, the very measure that was intended to effect evil produced good: the tyrant enriched the Church of heaven with Saints, and the Church militant with so many fresh patrons."

The American Ecclesiastical Review published in 1902, shared courtesy of Aleteia, explains a very interesting custom observed in a few places, sadly not even kept in the 1962 Missal, on the unique color vestments for both December 28th and January 3rd in honor of the Holy Innocents:

"On Holy Innocents [December 28] violet is ordinarily used at the Mass and Office. For the spirit of the feast indicates a twofold sentiment—that of sorrow with the weeping Hebrew mothers, and that of limbo where the little Innocents were necessarily to be detained until after the sealing of our Redemption in the Resurrection of our Lord. But when the feast of Holy Innocents happens on a Sunday, its spirit mingles with that of the joy peculiar to the octave of Christmas … Hence the Church does not permit violet, which is the color both of sorrow and of penance, on Sunday, indicating by the red color that on that day she forgets the sadness and regards the little victims of Bethlehem simply as martyrs of Christ.

 

"However, on the eighth day of Holy Innocents she uses rose color. Rose is red tempered by white. Red is the martyr’s sign; white the vane of peace and truth and innocence. Thus the Church indicates by the choice of this color on the eighth day, that at the termination of their course of martyrdom these little ones obtain the heavenly reward of innocence; they are virgins that have passed through the purifying process of a singular baptism by blood … white and red commingled mark the color of our little Innocents in fair, scarce-blushing rose."

Many other sources (e.g. Matters Liturgical, the Catholic Encyclopedia, the 8th Edition of the Baltimore Ceremonial, etc) just refer to the Octave Day of Holy Innocents as a day with red vestments, in contrast to the pre-1955 rubrics which prescribe violet for their December 28th feastday. 

Collect:

O God, whose praise the martyred Innocents on this day confessed, not by speaking, but by dying, destroy all the evils of sin in us, that our life also may proclaim in deeds, thy faith which our tongues profess. Through Jesus Christ, thy Son our Lord, Who liveth and reigneth with thee, in the unity of the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen.