Homily for Mass for Babies Who Died Before Baptism

October 14, 2023
Saint Patrick Cathedral
Fort Worth, Texas

Isaiah 25:6a, 7-8b
Psalm 25:4-5ab, 6, 7b, 17,20
Matthew 11:25-30

“On this mountain He will destroy the veil that veils all peoples, the web that is woven over all nations. He will destroy death forever. The Lord GOD will wipe away the tears from all faces; the reproach of His people He will remove from the whole earth; for the LORD has spoken.” The veil of death about which Isaiah speaks has many layers in which human beings have been shrouded and obscured since our first parents sinned in disobedience in the Garden of Eden. There is first the bitter experience of death whereby human beings are separated from each other and where there formerly was a father, or a mother, or a sister, or a friend, now remains only a gap with bittersweet memories and a tear in the fabric of one’s life.

Yet, today as we gather in hope to pray and to mourn for those children who have died before Baptism, our minds must go to another type of obscurity that the veil of death brings upon the mothers and fathers of their children who die before Baptism. This aspect of the veil of death is woven by the dominant culture that does not even recognize the very real sense of loss and its corresponding and painful grief of the death of an unbaptized and unborn child because society’s veil of death rejects the life and its dignity of the unborn. If the wise and learned of our society were to acknowledge the death of these children, they would be compelled to recognize their lives. So, the veil of death ignores and dismisses the very genuine experience of grief that you feel and that rightly you should mourn.

We are here together today because God has revealed to each of us, especially to you mothers and fathers, the childlike, what the wise and learned of our culture cannot see. The revelation is that God has destroyed death forever in the death and Resurrection of His Son and that your grief is transformed by hope in the power of God that enables you to mourn with confidence that God has received your children and that you shall see them again. This confidence born of hope further reveals to us that as your children are with God, they now are intercessors on your behalf and on behalf of their siblings and family members, and you shall see them again with perfect clarity.

It is this Christian hope that prompted Saint Bernard of Clairvaux to write to a young couple who had suffered a miscarriage and worried about the child’s soul because the child died before Baptism, “Your faith spoke for this child. Baptism for this child was only delayed by time. Your faith suffices. The waters of your womb — were they not the waters of life for this child? Look at your tears. Are they not like the waters of Baptism? Do not fear this. God’s ability to love is greater than our fears. Surrender everything to God.”

It is God’s omnipotence that prompts us to hope. This theological virtue is a grace of the Holy Spirit that accompanies His gift of the fear of the Lord. Our first and perfect example and intercessor for hope is the Blessed Virgin Mary. Her fullness of grace enabled her vision to pierce the veil of death that would be fully destroyed by Her Son. She pondered the Word of God in her heart. Her “yes,” her “fiat” displayed her confidence in God’s power even as she stood silently in awe of God’s power. She carried Jesus in her body; she held Him as an infant in Bethlehem; she held His dead body in her arms with her heart pierced in sorrow at Calvary.

At each moment her words prayed with Elizabeth confirm our hope in God’s power, “He has shown the strength of His arm and has scattered the proud in their conceit; He has cast down the mighty from their thrones and has lifted up the lowly; He has filled the hungry with good things and the rich He has sent away empty; He has come to the help of His servant Israel for He has remembered His promise of mercy, the promise he made to our fathers, to Abraham, and his children forever.”  “All generations will call me blessed.” This means that the future brought about instrumentally by Mary’s “yes,” what is to come, belongs to God, it is in God’s hands, that it is God who conquers our enemies and brings us home to Himself.

Second to the Blessed Virgin Mary is her most chaste Spouse, Saint Joseph, the righteous and just man entrusted by God with the paternal care of Jesus even before His birth in Bethlehem. To say that Saint Joseph was righteous means that he hoped with confidence that God, in accordance with God’s own righteousness, would keep God’s promise and act in history to ‘vindicate’ His people by saving them from their enemies and oppressors as they could not save themselves. This righteousness of Saint Joseph was what formed his imagination through his faithful worship of God, his study of the Law, and his keeping of the Ten Commandments as the Covenant, confident that God would not tolerate the oppression of His People and that God would intervene victoriously on their behalf delivering them from evil and the power of death.

Today we pray for all infants, your children, who have died before Baptism and in so doing we entrust them to God with confidence. We stand before God with the Blessed Virgin Mary and Saint Joseph with the Holy Spirit’s gift of the fear of the Lord and the virtue of hope in God’s power to receive these children into heaven where we will meet them and know them with perfect clarity where the “Lord GOD will wipe away the tears from all faces.”  His mercy is more powerful than sin and death. His mercy and His Grace lift the veil and unweave the web on no other terms, but the terms of His unconditional love made real in the hope of the Holy Family and sealed in the Blood of Christ.