Today we commemorate the Holy Innocents, the children under the age of two who were slaughtered for Christ by Herod in Bethlehem. They were toddlers, barely two years old at the oldest, the age of the crèche, not even kindergarten. For their fathers and mothers, they were marvellous, children who were still being raised up against the cheek and who were blessed by the first prophet who passed by. Wanting to reach the infant King of Israel, it was the little ones that Herod had killed; the first to be welcomed by the God of Love who came to save mankind. They were unable to speak. But in the eyes of Christ, it is existence and not age that offers the freedom to enter the Church.

The Communion, taken from Matthew 2:18, took up the cry of Rachel, which, according to Dom Cardine, can be heard in the word "ululatus", very well illustrated by the best manuscripts which translate the virga strata of the second syllable by a C-C unison -- and not the B-C pes (an upward-moving, two-step neume). The Church, nourished by the divine mystery of charity, never forgets the desolation of mothers. She sympathises with them to the end; but, in the depths of her heart, she is elevated to the one who alone can console such pains. To honour this maternal pain, she agrees to suspend today some of the manifestations of the joy that floods her heart during this Octave of the newborn Christ. She does not dare to wear in her sacred vestments the crimson colour of the Martyrs, so as not to recall too vividly the blood that gushes forth from the womb; she even refrains from wearing the white colour that marks joy and goes badly with such poignant pains. Instead the Church takes on the colour purple, which is the colour of mourning and regret. 

The melody of this Communion develops in the high register, around the D; the tenor of this piece built in the 7th mode. The initial word, Vox, as well as ploratus and ululatus, as we have said, are specially underlined by the melody.