A Modern Application Some Catholic Communities Have Attached to the Day

In recent decades, some Catholic parishes, dioceses and pro-life organisations, particularly in the United States, have adopted the Holy Innocents feast as an occasion for prayer vigils, memorial services and public commemoration connected to opposition to legal abortion, drawing an explicit parallel between the biblical account of Herod's killing of children and their own view of abortion as the killing of the innocent in the present day, a modern application of the feast's ancient theme that is promoted by specific advocacy groups and by bishops sympathetic to that cause rather than being a universally observed or uncontested part of the feast's meaning across the whole Catholic Church.

This contemporary application sits alongside, rather than replacing, the feast's older and more general historic association with the protection and patronage of children broadly, and Catholics who mark the day do so with varying emphases, some focused specifically on the abortion debate and others keeping the day in its older and more general register as a commemoration of violence against children and an occasion of sympathy for child victims of violence in the world generally, without any single interpretation being formally mandated by the church's own liturgical texts for the day.