www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life Prayer For Baby Christian

A child was buried yesterday, under a blossoming cherry tree, at Edge Hill Cemetery in Charles Town, West Virginia. His given name, if he had one, is known only to God.

Please pray for him, or maybe more to the point, ask him to pray for us.

For our society's indifference to life and especially to children.

On March 21st, a Park Ranger in Harper's Ferry, West Virginia, found a trash bag in the water at the edge of the Shenandoah River. Thinking it had been thrown in by a park visitor, he picked it up, but found that it was heavy, weighted down with several barbell weights.

Inside the bag, he found the body of a newborn baby boy, with the cord still attached.

People donated all the things needed for a proper funeral, including a blue shirt with a puppy on the front. The monument carver worked overtime to finish the stone, with a baby lamb engraved at the top.

The inscription:

IN MEMORY OF BABY CHRISTIAN

GIVEN TO JEFFERSON COUNTY

MARCH 21, 2004

Baby Christian, Pray for us!

Lord, have Mercy on us!

Memory eternal to God's precious child, Christian, who will no more suffer the pains of this imperfect world and whom He has taken now to a place where there is neither weeping nor sighing, but only joy and life and love everlasting.

Dear Neil,

Amen to your beautiful prayer.
Sorrowfully,
Alice

Baby Christian is at peace and surrounded with love , a love that he did not experience in his short time on earth.

May I also make a plea that we pray for his earthly Mother - who knows what forced her to abandon her child - in pain she gave birth to him and now she has given him away.

May the Lord show her His mercy , and pardon her sin.

May Baby Christian watch over his Mother and bring her to the Lord.

in tears

Anhelyna

Dear Anhelyna,

You show much wisdom. We should also think of the mother--who knows the 'hell' in which her troubled soul lives--drugs, prostitution, despair, poverty....she too, just like her infant, looks as if she had no one to care for her or love her, or she would not have been driven to do such a horrible thing. May our Lord God have mercy on her, deliver her from the demons that plague her life, and bring her to repentance and to Him.

In Christ,
Alice

AMEN!

(This is my short response. Will have more later. Must go earn daily bread.)

Brothers and Sisters:

I freely admit to being dense. So having said that, may I ask for someone to enlighten me.

Loretta and I lost our third child in 1986. We named her Christine Marie. There is a hole in my heart that will not heal--like the hole Jesus had after being pierced with the lance. We could not have any more children without endangering Loretta's life--long story.

We also could not afford to support any more children after that date for many reasons.

But to the question--how can anyone throw away a child? If I could do it, I'd say give him or her to me.

When I hear of this sort of thing--and the news seems to have more and more such stories--I come to a complete halt. I cannot function because I have no answer to such a profound disregard for human life.

Please help.

In Christ,

BOB

P.S.: I will pray for the child and for the mother and for all children and mothers who will be in this situation.

Dear Bob,

I don't have any better clue than you about why someone would throw a child away. There have been three babies abandoned this week in the Washington area. We have a law here that an unwanted child can be brought to a hospital or fire station and no questions will be asked. I understand that is also the law in West Virginia.

I promised Anhelyna a longer answer to her request for prayer for the mother. Unfortunately, my answer includes another tragedy from this area.

My wife, a Roman Catholic, thinks that her Archbishop is a very good preacher. Indeed, she is something of a Cardinal McCarrick "groupie". So, in the past three years, we have gone to hear him at four different churches, none of which is our home parish. And all of them at times we would not normally be attending.

Thus, we attended the vigil Mass for Palm Sunday at Christ the King parish. The pastor mentioned that on Tuesday (today) the church would have a funeral Mass for a grandmother and her grandson, who were murdered last week as a result of domestic violence.

Cardinal McCarrick, in his dismissal prayer, asked us all to pray for the departed, and also for the perpetrator. He said he knew it was hard to forgive this crime and hard to pray for the criminals, but that we must do what we can to bring these people to Christ, especially in this Holy season.

Having known two peple who were murdered, it is hard to pray for the criminals, but it is needed.

No one has said it better than our Anhelyna:



John
Pilgrim and Odd Duck

Indeed, we must pray for the child and for the mother.

As a sidewalk counselor, I saw many girls go into the mill, whose faces told a story of pain and misery that went beyond the bounds of this world. Satan torments them, and hounds them into the clinic; then, after the killing, he hounds them even more with what they have done.

Let us pray that this Holy Week and Pascha will be the occasion for miracles of grace in the lives of those who are trapped thus, in the bounds from which Christ came to free us by His death.

"Christ was made for us obedient unto death, even the death of the cross, and therefore God exalted Him, and gave Him a name that is above any other name."

LatinTrad

Brothers,
Pray for the father as well as the mother. Was the father in dire straits? Did he force himself criminally upon the mother? Did he even know, no matter what the nature of the relationship, that she was pregnant? Pray for the father and for all fathers. This is not such a good era for the notion of fatherhood and alas, the practice of it is waning as well.
God grant His Mercy!