Today, only a few days after Christmas, the Roman Catholic church remembers the massacre of all children under two in Bethlemem, ordered by King Herod to ensure he got rid of the baby Jesus. Since the Magi — “wise men” from the East — had told him that the prophecy had said that Jesus was “King of the Jews,” Herod saw him as a threat to his throne. Like so many political leaders now and through history driven by insecurity to consolidate their power at the expense of others, Herod ordered all the babies killed to ensure he got Jesus. He didn’t get Jesus, whose parents had fled into Egypt, having been warned by an angel of Herod’s plan. The babies were “collateral damage”.
It hardly needs saying that Herod’s self serving massacre of Bethlemen’s babes and toddlers is an archetype of the political violence that continues to haunt our world. We see it reported and recorded in real time on social media from many sites across the world, in places where people of all cultures, religions, customs, and power sacrifice children on the altars of ego and power.
And not just political leaders either — the sins of the churchmen are relentlessly exposed, as well they should be. News of child abuse and child sex trafficking as well as child slave labor constitute the dark underbelly of modern consumer culture. All of us moderns are implicated in one way or another. Acknowledging the interbeingness of this world entails acknowledging that none of us has clean hands. As the first letter of St. John says, “if you think you are not a sinner, you lie.” Direct resistence may be heroic, but it is futile against the weapons of this world and yields only sterile martyrdom. So what sort of counter-praxis of lamentation, repentence and atonement, can stand athwart the Herods of this world?
I like to think that palliative care is not just a blessing for people who have serious illness, whether death is near or not, but that its evolutionary praxis can confer blessings that undermine institutionalized violence. Palliative care, counter-intuitively, is a blessing because it befriends death, in the words of Henri Nouwen. In this way it is generative: the “blessed ones” the beneficiaries of palliative care as well as its practitioners, generate light, now matter how small the spark, that penetrates the darkness of suffering. That spark welcomes us all into the fellowship of the life that was made visible to us when God pitched his tent among us in Bethlehem.
Palliative care, with its explicit attention to spiritual pain, to the infinite value of the human person, confronts the culture of death that authorized the massacre of the Holy Innocents, the estimated 1.5 million children killed in the Shoah, the taking of children as hostages on October 7, and the retalitaory genocide of children in Gaza, among other current wars. It is our work to cultivate the growth of palliative care into a modern Trojan horse whose interdisciplinary teams, rather than soldiers armed with lethal weapons, will dismantle the death system from behind enemy lines so to speak, one bedside at a time. Only in such a culture of life can further massacres of the innocent be unthinkable.
Global Palliative Care 