As the adoptive parents of three siblings from the Philippines, my wife and I are so steeped in the needs of children—which dominate our lives day in and day out—that it is difficult for us to imagine a world in which things didn’t work this way. But the attention we see Jesus give to children in today’s Gospel was quite unusual. And not just attention: he held children up as a model. In Jesus’ time, children weren’t even seen as full members of the moral and social community, much less a population from which adults should learn something. Jesus’ elevation of the child in the midst of his disciples would have been shocking and surprising to his listeners.

The earliest Christians took Jesus’ example seriously. The Didache, one of the oldest surviving documents from the early Church, was particularly clear about the attention Christians ought to give the very youngest children—explicitly prohibiting abortion and infanticide, both relatively common practices in ancient Greece and Rome. Indeed, early Christians were known for rescuing and adopting unwanted infants (abandoned most often because they were female or disabled) from trash heaps and refuse sites where such children would be left. In so doing, they saved them from being snatched and sold into slavery or prostitution, being eaten by animals, or dying from exposure.

This history of Christians’ counter-cultural solidarity with children is particularly poignant on a day like today, when we pray in a special way for the protection of our very youngest children—who also are under threat of terrible violence. It may be comforting to know that the attention we give to these children today puts us in deep communion with Christians going back to the very beginnings of the Church, and is one of the most important ways we can imitate Jesus himself.