Holy Innocents – Colletine Infant Jesus

When I was in Poland with a friend a few years ago, we were approached by a woman who had seen us in adoration. She began to speak to us of her pro-life work (amazing in itself) and gave us each a holy card of the statute of the Colletine Infant Jesus, patroness of their work.

The card has embedded within it a piece of cloth that was touched to the miraculous statue.

The statue is in the center of Cracow on the side chapel of St Joseph’s Church, with the Bernadine Sisters of St Claire.

According to the sisters:

The statue came to Cracow drifting in the Vistula river and nobody knew where it came from. It came to rest at a riverbank near the convent of the Colettine Sisters of Poor Claires in Cracow. The sisters rescued the statue from the water, brought to their convent and put it on the little altar in the refectory. From that moment many miracles began to take place, especially miraculous cures from various illnesses. Everybody who asked for graces received them, the sisters experienced special protection from the miraculous statue, so it was held in great veneration and love. The sisters confessed with simplicity: “We are delighted to have Him, and we believe that none of the convents is as rich as ours, because all property, treasure and riches are nothing in comparison to the Providence of the Lord. We did all our profession and took our veils before Him… We and our mothers and all the people who with great trust have come to this statue have their prayers answered.”

Since receiving this card I have been drawn to pray to the infant Jesus every day. One meditation has particularly taken a deep place in my prayer life. It is of the babies lost to abortion around the newborn Jesus thanking and praising Him for coming to earth and opening heaven to us all.

It strikes me how I know a very large army of unborn children through my work for the past 30 years in healing from abortion. I also can sense profoundly my own aborted son among them, interceding before God for the conversion of their parents and all those involved in abortion.

It is a beautiful comforting meditation, one that seems to confirm in my heart the words of St John Paul the II in the Gospel of Life (99), that they are “living in the Lord”.

The meditation has gone deeper over the past two years as I envision those with Christ reaching out to the newly aborted to accompany them to heaven. Of course, this does not make the horror of abortion any less evil, but it does speak to the Mercy of our God who desires the salvation of all of His children. It also speaks to the bond of the infant Jesus with the unborn.

I think we often get so caught up in this world and thinking we have so much power and so many answers that we do not really listen enough or take advantage of the power of the intercession of the millions of unborn children who, like the Holy Innocents shed their blood.

One of the things that has always moved me deeply is the fact that God used my son to bring me to Himself. My son, living in the Lord, loved me to Christ. I have seen this over and over again in the Entering Canaan ministry, the healing of mothers and fathers through the very children they aborted.

As we remember the Holy Innocents on their Feast Day, let us in a special way, pray for the intercession of all the unborn in heaven, ask them to pray not only for an end to abortion and the conversion of those involved, but also for us. To remember our own nothingness, to becomes empty vessels of God’s grace, love and mercy, to be always open to His will not ours, and to grow in trust no matter how things may look, knowing that like the Innocents of the time of Jesus, these Innocents too have received the victory of Christ, in love and mercy.

To learn more about the image and for a novena visit:

THE COLETTINE INFANT JESUS NOVENA – Klasztor Sióstr Bernardynek w Krakowie (bernardynki.com)