For Any Sunday After the Epiphany – Children’s 10 Current Plagues

Children’s 10 Current Plagues

God Mother and Father, You who became one of us as a political child refugee in Africa, help us to do something as a church against the 10 modern children’s plagues designed by the contemporary Herods and Constantines:

1. Hunger. 6,000,000 under the age of five die every year.
2. Sexual abuse, pedophile and pederasty. One bishop blamed the “inhering evilness of children” as the cause for the priests and pastors to rape them.
3. Forced migration. 150,000 infants attempt to cross international borders annually. The majority will be deported.
4. Incarceration. More than 1,000,000 are behind bars around the world. Jesus keeps sending us to liberate the captives (Luke 4)
5. Laboring instead of studying and playing. Seven out of ten work in agriculture breaking their backs, to put food on our tables.
6. Premature aging.
7. Being used as drug mules.
8. Recruited by the armies, at least since the time of the Children’s Crusade of 1212.
9. Prostitution.
10. Organ trafficking.

Our Fatherly Mother, grant us the courage to accompany children to the Promised Land now, so that they may play, dream, drum, laugh and have plenty of food and joy.

Amen