Originally published at National Catholic Register
COMMENTARY: Jimmy Lai is in his fourth year of solitary confinement in a Hong Kong prison, unjustly prosecuted for defending human rights.
The post-Christmas liturgical calendar may seem a bit Scrooge-like, as the child-centered, innocent joy of the Nativity is quickly followed by three feasts of a different, even sobering, character.
First, on Dec. 26: St. Stephen the Protomartyr, stoned to death outside Jerusalem by a mob baying for his blood (see Acts 7:54-60). Then, on Dec. 27: St. John, the apocalyptic visionary of Revelation 18:2 — “Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great!” — whose enemies, according to a tradition maintained at the Basilica of St. John Before the Latin Gate, tried to boil him in oil before exiling him to Patmos. Finally, on Dec. 28: the Holy Innocents, butchered en masse because of the paranoia of Herod the Great (who did not cavil to murder three of his own sons).
The infancy narratives of Luke’s gospel give us the key to understanding that this seemingly strange liturgical juxtaposition — Christmas and martyrdom — embodies a deep truth of Christian faith. For immediately after Luke describes Jesus’s birth and his ritual insertion into the People of Israel
