Ceremonies for the justification
of unborn children who died without baptism
Steps towards a simplified liturgy
A simple catechism of doctrinal elements
Question 1:
Why can aborted children not be baptised?
I. The Church accepts the notion of baptism of desire, formulated as follows: "The mother's desire of baptism for the child while it is alive has value of baptism for the child" (Scheeben).
The conditions of this justification of a dead child without sacramental baptism can be resumed in three elements:
a) The natural physical relationship of mother to child.
b) Actualisation of desire of baptism of the mother/or father of the child: this desire of baptism must be truly explicit, manifest, real.
c) The child must still be alive when this desire is expressed, before he dies.
II. Now, the Church, before the effective death of these abandoned children killed and forgotten (for not to desire the salvation of a child is to forget him), prays, acts and actuates the Eucharist in desiring their salvation. She prays for the living and for the dead at each eucharistc Sacrifice. She deposits in the eucharistic Heart of Christ, while the future aborted children are still alive, the desire of baptism for them, which remains potentially in the eucharistic Heart of Christ which unites time and eternity at each Mass.
III. So that, the Church alone, through a normal Eucharist, cannot apply this "justification" to the children: the natural, parental, physical relationship to the child is missing.
IV. The parents, and/or the family or those close, have this natural physical relationship and their responsibility -(by the prayer of the Church, the Virgin Mary, and their suffering child wherever he may be)- may awaken consciousness of their fault and their divine mission as responsible Christian parents.
V. But the efficacy in the order of justification of their child is inoperant, because the child is already dead.
Question 2:
How to render operant these desires of baptism of the Church and of the parents, both inoperant when separate?
I. By the repentance, the discovered and renewed love of the parents for their innocent child, and by the Eucharist: - so as to conjoin together in one dispositive act of justification by grace the three elements indispensable to this but which have been separated in time.
II. Celebrate a Eucharist, again, to this intention:
a) To recall the desire of Baptism which was actuated for the living child by the Church before it died, this desire in a state of expectancy in the eucharistic Heart of Christ reactuated today after the death of the child.
b) To conjoin to it the repentance and forgiveness of the parents, who will readopt their child within this desire of baptism which dates from when it was alive and is still conserved in the eucharistic Heart of Christ (§ also Question 6).
c) Consecrate definitely these children to the Holy Trinity and the Precious Blood of Christ Redeemer, so their incorporation in the grace of salvation may be realised.
Question 3:
What are the constituant elements to be signified in this liturgy?
I. The Eucharist, for the reactualisation of the desire of baptismal salvation that the members of the Church have expressed while the children were alive.
II. Lustral water, for purification by the element of water to express mutual forgiveness, the purification given when the parents have manifested their repentance; a baptism similar to John the Baptist's while awaiting the Hour of Christ.
III. A lighted candle and naming: to manifest the unity of desire of their incorporation into the grace of justification, taking some elements symbolising the ceremony of baptism, never forgetting the importance of: - the Name given, the light of Faith, and the Credo.
IV. The act of contrition, to manifest the return, the contrition of the parents, and the representatives of all humanity, and even of those in the Church who have delayed in taking an interest in the torment of the souls of the innocents abandoned by all.
V. The intention of the minister of the Holy Sacrifice, intention of sanctification and incorporation into the grace of the Church; the priest should be very explicit as to his intention to apply the grace of justification to children who are waiting in silence after an innocent death.
Question 4:
Does this question appertain to the power committed by Jesus Christ to his Church?
I. It is necessary to explain here the question of encounter between baptism of desire and baptism of blood. Martyrdom, baptism of b1ood is founded when there is:
a) Putting to death of a son of God,
b) Putting to death of which the principal efficient cause is hatred of Christ and/or of the Church, his mystical Body.
Thus, the holy Innocents celebrated on 28/12 are proclaimed by the Church martyrs by reason of their death for hatred of Christ.
II. After Vatican Council II which set full light on the royal priesthood and the integral character of the mystical Body of the Church by proclaiming Mary Mother of the Church, it is time to define a statute for the new innocents killed by hatred of Christ and his Church (§ Question 6).
III. But is abortion a crime perpetrated by hatred of the Church? Yes, on the following points:
a) Their principal efficient cause, the homicidal hatred of Satan, whose first motive is hatred of Christ, God made innocent and child of mankind, of the innocent childhood of man embraced by Christ in his Incarnation.
b) Their secondary efficient cause: hatred of the permanent teaching of the Church, only institution in the world of man who adopts loves and defends humanity without defence in the human embryo. Abortion (propaganda, ideology, organisation) is one of the most efficacious elements to permit the disappearance of judeo-Christian culture and above all the teaching of Christ and the Church on Life.
c) Their final cause: the intention of ideological militants in the massacre of the new innocents seems to be principally the instauration of a new Godless culture - of man without the Church.
IV. These elements doubtless suffice to establish that these children are victims of explicitly anti-Christian organisations, working for hatred of Christ and the Church, and engaged in the homicidal work of the powers of darkness; and therefore in so much as concerns the root of the cause are killed by hatred of Christ and hatred of the teachings and maternal care of his mystical Body the Church.
V. The Eucharist will therefore:
- conjoin this innocent blood to the Precious Blood of Christ crucified,
- conjoin the virtue of baptism of desire to the merit of baptism of blood potentially present in the eucharistic Heart of Christ.
Is it nevertheless within the power of keys of the Church of Peter to engage itself further by an express proclamation to integrate into its bosom these innocent children awaiting justification by grace?
Question 5:
Can it be founded in law that the militant Church has the possibility to attain dead children to incorporate them in grace?
I. The militant Church can only attain to this effect people "in via". This is the main objection.
II. What does the Church think? She has several times spoken to maintain against the Jansenists and the pseudo mystics:
a) The impossibility for these new human lives to participate in the glory of Heaven because their souls remain stained with original sin.
b) Their statute of waiting which some call, maybe maladroitly, limbo; in this respect are noteworthy Innocent III's Letter adressed to the Archbishop of Arles, and in particular Pius VI's Auctorem fidei. This limbo is not hell, which contains the souls of those damned for eternity. It is not Heaven, which welcomes the elect for beatific vision. Nor is it a part of Purgatory (see St. Thomas Aquinas: time in Purgatory is changed to "aevum", souls there are no longer "in via" in univocal earthly time).
III. At what moment does this passage from "univocal time" to "aevum" take place? After particular judgement. So, the children with whom we are concerned here are in a place of waiting because they are souls who cannot be judged, properly speaking, because they are innocent, and they await on this side of "aevum" the prayer of the Church.
IV. This state of waiting therefore puts the children under the possible authority of the militant Church, so their statute can be considered as that of souls "in via ". It is for this same reason that the Eucharist does not really baptise them, but incorporates them into the militant Church while giving them a very particular sanctifying grace. (§ Question 7)
V. The Eucharist is indeed the only means for the Church to reach them in the supernatural fecundity of grace, by reason of its quality of being the "viatic" sacrament, the faithful who piously, with holy water attempt to "baptise" them at distance are certainly mistaken, but their gesture remains very important, for they express with the daily Holy Sacrifice of the mass the desire of baptism of the faithful while the child is alive (see Question 2, IIa).
Question 6:
Why must the Church henceforth exercise an effective maternity on children aborted (naturally or provoked) who died without baptism?
I. The proclamation of Mary, Mother of the Church, places her in her hour of effective fecundity for a substitute maternity. Not only on the level of grace, but also on a natural level.
II. Philosophy and natural law recognise as a fact the privation of parental rights when the parents are irresponsible or incapable of exercising their fatherhood and motherhood. This is indeed the case of these aborted children whose parents have not exerted their relationship with the child, for example by not expressing their desire of baptism for them if they are Christians, or even by not actuating a living and conscious relationship to the child within the womb.
III. Parents who proceed to a voluntary abortion, by a crime, 'de jure' place themselves of their own act in privation of parental rights. Similarly, those who do not consider as a human person what they often consider as a mere mass of cells without a spiritual soul, not enjoying all the rights to respect, to life, and to the human dignity due to every human person created by God: these begetters have no natural relationship of fatherhood or motherhood to the child who dies in the womb. Similarly, for those who, after the natural or induced death of the children are unaware in fact that these children continue to live by their immortal soul, and think that no live relationship is possible for a child who for them does not exist.
IV. For, natural law can accord that these deprived parental rights may be inherited by those who wish to adopt these neglected, killed and suffering children: because they admit to their existence, they defend the dignity of these children, and because they exert an effective relationship of love and adoption, of prayer and life towards them. The members of the Church who exert their humanity in this integral way may therefore by natural law inherit of these lost parental rights and reclaim these children as their own.
V. What is more, the supernatural substitution of the militant Church and Her Mother may henceforth exert itself on these two natural and supernatural levels, which was not the case before the express proclamation of Mary's divine Maternity of the Church.
Question 7:
Why is a liturgy incorporating these children into the grace of the Church by the Mass at present inapt to introduce them instantly into Heaven?
I. Apart from the children explicitly killed in the womb because they are Christian (§ Question 4), and those who receive from their parents the baptism of desire (§ Question 1, I), the Church continues to affirm rightly the necessity of Baptism for salvation.
II. The Eucharist attains them with its own grace and in so much that the aborted children, whether naturally or induced, have remained in a state prior to particular judgement.
III. The Eucharist is not of itself apt to remove them from their status of souls "in via" and thus introduce them to judgement which would immediately place them in beatific vision; as already explained, the virtue of the Eucharist is to express the maternal adoption of the Church, to incorporate the children in her bosom, to introduce them to grace by welcoming them to the supernatural fecundity of her sacraments, and introduce them to justification, which will in its turn introduce them to the Vision of God at the Hour of Christ.
IV. It is therefore not correct to say that this ceremony baptises them in the proper sense, but rather that it introduces them to a new life as children of God and the Church, of peace, pardon, gratitude, and the supernatural desire for the Hour of Christ.
V. Thus will be accomplished the word in the Book of Revelation about "the souls under the altar" who see themselves given a white robe that they may rest while awaiting that the number of their companions who are to be put to death like them be complete (Apoc. VI, v.9-12): "Et datae sunt illis singulae stolae albae et dictum est illis ut resquiescerent tempus adhuc modium donec impleantur conservi eorum et fratres eorum qui interficiendi sunt sicut et illi et vidi cum aperuisset sigillum sextum".