The Answer to Evil and Suffering

The atheist "trilemma" from Epicurus to Mackie

The classic objection against God's existence drawn from evil goes back to Epicurus (as reported by Lactantius, De ira Dei, 13) and received its most rigorous contemporary formulation from the Australian atheist philosopher John L. Mackie ("Evil and Omnipotence", Mind, 1955):

(P1) If God exists, then he is omniscient, omnipotent and wholly good. (P2) If God is omnipotent, he has the power to eliminate all evil. (P3) If God is omniscient, he knows that evil exists.

(P4) If God is wholly good, he desires to eliminate all evil. (P5) But evil exists. (C) Therefore God does not exist.^[10]

The argument presents itself as a demonstration of the logical incompatibility between the classical divine attributes and the existence of evil. It is, says Lavagna, "the only atheist argument that has any real force" because it "touches us at the very depth of our human condition"^[11].

Ivan Karamazov: handing back his ticket

The most formidable objection is not logical but moral. In The Brothers Karamazov (1880), Ivan does not deny God; he refuses the world as it is made, because he sees innocent children suffering in it. No future harmony, no paradise, he says in substance, could redeem a single tear of a martyred child^[12]. Rather than accept such a world, he prefers to hand God back his entrance ticket: he does not refuse to admit God, he refuses the world as it is made^[13].

This objection goes beyond Epicurus, for no distinction dissolves it: Ivan understands the greater-good answer and refuses it in the name of the child. Dostoevsky sets no counter-argument against him: Alyosha's answer is a silent kiss. The novel senses in advance what this article will establish: evil calls first not for an explanation, but for a presence.

Why this objection also touches the believer

The scandal of evil is not the weapon of unbelievers alone. The Catechism acknowledges that the experience of evil puts faith itself to the test^[14]. The psalms cry out this protest, the whole book of Job is the trial brought against God by an overwhelmed just man^[15], and Christ himself cries out on the Cross. The first mistake of anyone who wants to explain evil would be to pretend the question is illegitimate or shameful.

On the trial of God's silence see Why does God seem silent?.

The false alternative that must be refused

Faced with this objection, two symmetrical pitfalls present themselves to the believer:

• First pitfall — bluntly affirming that "everything that happens comes from God", and imagining a God who would positively will sickness, war or the Shoah. That is a caricature: it repels our contemporaries, and it is explicitly refuted by the Church, which teaches that God "is in no way, directly or indirectly, the cause of moral evil" (CCC § 311)^[16].

• Second pitfall — affirming conversely that "God has nothing to do with evil", and ending up diminishing his omnipotence (the first article of the Creed). That leads to an impotent god, who is no longer the God of Revelation. The CCC is explicit: "Of all the divine attributes, only God's omnipotence is named in the Creed: to confess it is of great importance for our life" (CCC § 268)^[17].

The Catholic way: three affirmations to hold simultaneously

The Catholic answer passes between these two pitfalls by holding three affirmations simultaneously, none of which can be dropped without distorting the doctrine:

This is what Olivier Bonnassies calls the "Catholic 'and'": the three affirmations must hold together. The whole difficulty of the matter consists in showing how these three truths, far from opposing one another, fit together so as to make evil, and even chastisement, the occasion of a greater good.

The problem of evil therefore arises never on the side of God's power, but always on the side of his will: if a painful event happens, either God could not prevent it (excluded by faith in his omnipotence), or he did not want to prevent it.

"God, whose power equals His will, would never allow any evil to subsist, neither in His works nor in His words, if He were not powerful and good enough to bring good out of evil itself." : Saint Augustine, Enchiridion on Faith, Hope, and Charity, ch. 11^[18]

The Catechism hardens the same logic:

"We firmly believe that God is master of the world and of its history. But the ways of his providence are often unknown to us. Only at the end, when our partial knowledge ceases, when we see God 'face to face,' will we fully know the ways by which — even through the dramas of evil and sin — God has guided his creation through to that definitive Sabbath rest for which he created heaven and earth." : Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 314^[19]

Holding to omnipotence is not one option among others: a compassionate but overwhelmed God, who would weep with us without being able to act, would no longer be the God of the Creed.

Many disagreements about evil come from words not designating the same realities. Classical theology rigorously distinguishes five terms: evil, suffering, pain, Cross, justice/chastisement.

Evil — privation, not substance

Saint Augustine, against the Manicheans who made evil a substance coeternal with the good, established once and for all that evil is not a thing, but a privation:

"Every nature, insofar as it is a nature, is a good: only a privation of good can be called evil. […] Evil has no efficient cause, but a deficient one: it is not an effection but a defection." — St. Augustine, Enchiridion (Handbook to Laurence), ch. XI^[20]

Saint Thomas takes up exactly this definition: "The term evil therefore designates a certain absence of good" (Summa, I, q. 48, a. 1)^[21]. The consequence is decisive: God, who is Being by essence, cannot be the author of evil — which is not a being but a lack.

Classical theology distinguishes two types of evil:

• Moral evil (sin) — the free refusal, by the spiritual creature, of God and his order of Love. It is the only true evil, and God never wills it, neither directly nor indirectly (CCC § 311).
• Physical evil (pain, sickness, death, material privations) — a consequence of the rupture introduced by original sin into the order of Creation (CCC §§ 400, 1607). This "evil" is not an evil in itself: God permits it "in order to draw a greater good from it" (CCC § 412, citing St. Thomas Aquinas), and, in his hand, it becomes a remedy — in the words of St. Augustine: "the almighty God would never in his infinite goodness have allowed evil to be mingled with his work, had he not been good and powerful enough to draw good from evil itself"^[22].

Saint Alphonsus Liguori, Doctor of the Church, sums up this doctrine in an unforgettable formula:

"And even evils, in what sense are they evils? Because we call them so and make them such; for if we received them as we should, that is, with submission and from the hands of God, they would no longer be evils for us, but so many goods." — St. Alphonsus Liguori, Preparation for Death, 36th consideration^[23]

Suffering — reaction of a thwarted will

Saint Thomas Aquinas laid down the technical principle that illuminates everything else: suffering is by definition the reaction of the will to what thwarts it — following the Augustinian principle he takes up (Summa, I-II, q. 35-36), sorrow has for its object only what opposes the will, and pain is born of the gap between what we love and what befalls us^[24].

Immediate consequence: one and the same outward situation can be suffering for one person and indifference (even happiness) for another, according to the disposition of the will. Three concrete examples illustrate this:

• An athlete who breaks his leg on the eve of the Tour de France lives through a torment; a hiker who precisely wanted to be stopped for a few months blesses his fall.
• Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, afflicted with tuberculosis, writes to her sister Céline that suffering loved is our "riches", our "livelihood"^[25].
• Saint Padre Pio, marked by the stigmata from 1918 until his death, declares himself so happy even amid suffering^[26].

This joy in suffering, attested in all the saints, is not pious affectation — it is the logical consequence of the Thomist definition: if the will accepts pain in union with God, the pain remains, but suffering, in the strict sense, lessens or disappears.

Pain is not suffering

This technical distinction (pain = sensation; suffering = reaction of the will) is one of the most important in the whole matter. It can be summed up in the following table:

This distinction avoids two frequent misunderstandings:

• The Stoic misunderstanding — which claims we should will pain, or act as if it did not exist. False: pain is real, and Jesus himself really suffered in his flesh, against the Docetists (Quicumque, DS 76; CCC §§ 609 and 612).
• The fatalist misunderstanding — which would identify pain with suffering, and believe that all suffering is inescapable. False: the same pain may or may not be accompanied by suffering, according to the orientation of the will. Sister Marie du Sacré-Cœur Bernaud sums it up: our bitterest sufferings come above all from our will's opposition to what afflicts us, and resignation offered in our Fiat is the most effective remedy for wounded hearts^[27].

The Cross — suffering welcomed and offered out of love

The Cross is not suffering endured; it is suffering welcomed and offered out of love, following Christ. God's original plan was not suffering — "As long as he remained in the divine intimacy, man was to experience neither death […] nor suffering" (CCC § 376)^[28]; "His plan, when he created man, was not to make him bear pains, but to make him lead a blessed life in this world and in the next"^[29]. But after sin, Christ made suffering, through his Passion, "the great royal road of salvation"^[30].

The Cross is precisely evil turned into good by Love: "O happy fault that merited such and so great a Redeemer" sings the Church at the Easter Vigil (Exsultet).

Justice and chastisement — inner dimensions of Love

Saint Thomas Aquinas defines justice as "a constant and perpetual will to render to each his due" (Summa, II-II, q. 58, a. 1)^[31]. The CCC takes it up: justice consists in "giving to God and to one's neighbour what is due to them" (§ 1807)^[32]. It implies rewarding good and punishing evil.

The justice of God is therefore not an attribute competing with Love, but an inner dimension of Love — consisting in hating what destroys what we love.

If God were indifferent to the evil done to us, that would not be mercy: it would be contempt for the victims. "Because we love the Jews, we must hate the Shoah; because we love children, we must hate paedophilia" — it is the same movement by which God, because he loves us, cannot tolerate evil indefinitely. Saint John Paul II puts it bluntly: "God is a just judge who rewards good and punishes evil" (Salvifici Doloris, § 10)^[33].

Chastisement is therefore not an act of vengeance, but of pedagogy: "My son, do not despise the Lord's discipline or be weary of his reproof, for the Lord disciplines him whom he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives" (Heb 12:5-6)^[34]. "Those whom I love, I reprove and chasten" (Rev 3:19)^[35]. And Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta: "I wound my children in order to heal them. I destroy them in order to raise them up again"^[36].

Created freedom — condition of true love

First of all, it must be recalled that moral evil exists only because God willed to create free beings. It is the very condition of love: a forced love would not be one.

As Alvin Plantinga showed^[37] in God, Freedom, and Evil (Eerdmans, 1974): if God guaranteed us in advance that we would always use our free will well, then we would no longer be free — yet omnipotence consists in being able to do all that is logically possible, not the impossible.

This "free-will defense" explains moral evil: God, in creating free spiritual creatures (angels, men), voluntarily "limited" himself to respecting their consent — to the point that some could turn away from Him, and cause evil around them. Jesus reminds Luisa of this: "No one is acceptable to Me without the test. If she [the Virgin] had not passed through the test, I would have had a slave as My Mother and not a free person. Our relations, our works and our love want a free adherence"^[38].

Original sin — harmony broken

Physical evil (pain, sickness, death, natural catastrophes, disorders in creation), for its part, is not directly explained by present human freedom. We must go back to original sin — the first disobedience of our first parents, whose historical reality is a matter of faith (Council of Trent, Decree on Original Sin; Pius XII, Humani Generis, 1950)^[39]. The CCC teaches:

"The harmony in which they were established, thanks to original justice, is destroyed; the mastery of the soul's spiritual faculties over the body is broken; the union of man and woman becomes subject to tensions, their relations henceforth marked by lust and domination. Harmony with creation is broken: visible creation has become alien and hostile to man. Because of man, creation is now subject 'to its bondage to decay' (Rom 8:21)." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 400^[40]

Before sin, "man was to experience neither death […] nor suffering" (CCC § 376)^[41] — that is the state of Eden, in which man lived fully in the Divine Will. After sin, harmony is broken, and suffering enters the world. "Just as through one man sin entered the world, and through sin, death, and thus death has passed to all men because all have sinned" (Rom 5:12)^[42].

That original sin is a real event and not an edifying myth is a matter of faith. Pius XII reaffirmed it plainly in the face of exegeses that sought to dissolve it:

"The faithful indeed cannot adopt a theory whose supporters affirm either that after Adam there were on earth true men who did not descend from him as the first common father by natural generation, or that Adam designates the whole multitude of innumerable first fathers. For it is in no way apparent how such an affirmation can be reconciled with what the sources of revealed truth and the acts of the Church's magisterium teach concerning original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed." : Pius XII, encyclical Humani Generis, August 12, 1950, § 37^[43]

This affirmation has never been withdrawn. The Catechism confirms it: "The account of the fall in Genesis 3 uses figurative language, but affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of man"^[44]. Holding this in no way obliges one to a crude literalism: the language of Genesis is symbolic in its form, but the event it reports : the first free disobedience of a historical couple : is real and foundational.

The language of Genesis is symbolic in its form, but the event it reports is real and foundational.

It is precisely to the state of Eden that the Kingdom of the Fiat — the reign of the Divine Will on earth as in Heaven, announced by Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta — intends to bring us back: "There shall be no more death; neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more" (Rev 21:4)^[45].

Christ describes to Luisa the scope of this fall: before it, a single Will reigned; after it, there are two.

"My daughter, in Creation, the Will that decided to create all things was One. It was right that My Will should have Its Kingdom and the unfolding of Its Life in each thing, since It had created them. When man withdrew from Our Will, there was no longer one single Will reigning on earth, but two. […] My daughter, not doing My Will is the evil that comprises all evils, and is the collapse of all goods. It is the destruction of happiness, of order, of peace, and the great loss of My divine Kingdom." : Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta, The Book of Heaven, volume 21, March 26, 1927^[46]

This rupture explains the entry of evil into the world. Before the fall, man lived "that harmony of original justice, foreseen for man by God's plan, which was to be lost by the sin of our first parents"^[47]. After the fall, "death spread to all men"^[48]: Saint Paul sums up in two sentences the whole tragic anthropology of Christianity.

Each of us repeats Adam's movement with every sin.

The role of secondary causes — the "Catholic 'and'"

A simplistic formulation consists in saying: "God sends no evil, he merely lets secondary causes act" (the forces of nature, free wills). This formulation is partly true but insufficient:

• True in that God never wills the sin of those who harm us (CCC § 311); "for God cannot be tempted with evil and he himself tempts no one" (Jas 1:13)^[49].
• Insufficient because it:
  1. Does not account for the Cross itself: "It was the will of the Lord to crush him with pain" (Is 53:10); "He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all" (Rom 8:32); "the plan he had formed in advance" (Acts 2:23). The Father positively willed the Passion as the means of salvation — not the sin of the executioners (which he only permitted), but the redemptive oblation of the Son, as unanimously taken up by St. Anselm (Cur Deus Homo) and St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa, III, q. 47, a. 3: the Father delivered Christ to the Passion — out of love, and he is praised for it)^[50].
  2. Does not account for the direct trials sent by God, with which Scripture is full: Job, Sara's barrenness, Israel's desert, St. Paul's thorn (2 Cor 12:7).
  3. Does not account for St. Alphonsus' teaching that "untoward events, such as sickness, interior desolations, reversals of fortune, the death of our loved ones, come directly from God, while other events come to us only indirectly from God, that is, through men, such as calumnies, humiliations, injustices and all other kinds of persecutions"^[51].

This is what tradition calls the "Catholic 'and'" (dear to Olivier Bonnassies): we must hold both affirmations at once — God never wills sin, and yet nothing happens outside his will: neither what He wills positively, nor what He permits for a greater good. The contemporary Carmelite monk Wilfrid Stinissen sums it up:

Wilfrid Stinissen sums it up in Surrender: it is useless to torment our minds trying to distinguish precisely what God wills from what he merely permits — what he permits is also part of his overall plan, foreseen from the beginning; every event has its place in it, nothing is due to chance, and all that happens against our will can only come from his will, his Providence and the laws he has made^[52].

The act of the wicked and the situation of the victim

There remains the most personal objection: agreed for catastrophes, but when a man deliberately does me evil, God surely does not will that? The answer distinguishes two things. God never wills sin: he incites no one to sin and is never the cause of moral evil^[53]. Yet men's sins do not thereby escape Providence: God permits these sins and directs the resulting situation to our greatest good.

"It is true that the wicked often act against God's will, but His wisdom and power are so great that all that seems to oppose His will in fact contributes to the good results or ends He had fixed in advance." : Saint Augustine, Enchiridion, ch. 100^[54]

The Catechism gives for this the most striking formula with Joseph sold by his brothers, and then with the Passion: from the greatest moral evil ever committed, God drew the greatest good, without evil thereby becoming good^[55]. One must therefore separate the sinful action, which God never wills, and the situation of the victim, which God takes in hand: God did not will the evil committed, but he commits himself to drawing from the situation a good which, without it, might not have been received^[56].

This section synthesizes the theodicy — the rational, philosophical answer to the atheist argument from evil. For a fuller treatment, see the article The Free-Will Argument and The Proofs of God's Existence.

The logical argument from evil (Mackie, 1955)

As set out above, Mackie's logical argument claims to demonstrate an incompatibility between the divine attributes (omnipotence, omniscience, perfect goodness) and the existence of evil. The cornerstone of the argument is its premise 2: "If God is omnipotent, he has the power to eliminate all evil."

The free-will defense (Plantinga, 1974)

It is precisely this premise 2 that Alvin Plantinga definitively refuted in God, Freedom, and Evil (Eerdmans, 1974) — the founding text of contemporary philosophy of religion.

Let us detail Plantinga's argument:

• Omnipotence consists in being able to do all that is logically possible — not the impossible.
• But "it is impossible to force someone to do something freely" — it is a contradiction in terms.
• So God, who wills to create free beings and wills them to love him freely, cannot, without logical contradiction, guarantee that they will always use their freedom well.
• Moral evil is therefore the logically inevitable price of a world of free creatures — and such a world is better than a world of automata.

"If the unbeliever insists that an omnipotent being can do what is logically impossible, then the problem of evil disappears immediately, for a loving God could perfectly well create a world with suffering, even if that is impossible!" — William Lane Craig, On Guard, David C Cook, 2010, p. 155^[57]

The answer to natural evil: skeptical theism and Swinburne's theodicy

There remains the answer to natural evil (cancer, tsunamis, earthquakes…), which the free-will defense does not directly explain. Several paths complement one another:

• Skeptical theism: it suffices that it be possible that God has a morally sufficient reason for permitting a given evil — even if that reason escapes us. The burden of proof rests on the atheist, who would have to demonstrate that no greater good is possible — an impossible thing given the limits of the human intellect^[58].

• Swinburne's theodicy: according to Richard Swinburne (The Existence of God, 2nd ed., 2004, p. 245 — cited by Lavagna), natural evil is necessary to make moral evil possible: we must be able to observe the devastating effects of suffering before we can inflict it on others in full knowledge of the facts^[59].
• The theodicy of the virtues: without danger, no courage; without suffering, no compassion. A world without any natural evil would be a world without heroism or heroic virtue^[60].
• The eschatological theodicy: "If God exists, this life may be but a preparation for eternal life, and the suffering God permits here below may be nothing beside an eternity of happiness in the beatific vision"^[61].

To these philosophical answers, Christian theology adds another, decisive one: suffering has a redemptive character — it fashions a humble heart and disposes man to salvation. This is developed in the rest of this article.

Leibniz and best of all possible worlds

In his Essais de Théodicée (1710), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz coins the word theodicy and maintains that God created the best of all possible worlds^[62]. The intuition is not false, but it carries a trap: by justifying evil so strongly as necessary to harmony, one ends up banalizing it and speaking of a child's tears as of a useful cog. That is exactly what Ivan Karamazov refuses: suffering cannot be reckoned up.

The concession on logical ground

The most remarkable fact in the whole matter is that, on strictly logical ground, two atheist philosophers themselves conceded the point following Plantinga — and that a theist philosopher sums up the state of the debate as follows. Three testimonies (cited from Lavagna's French rendering, the original English texts going in the same direction):

"We may concede that the problem of evil does not, after all, demonstrate that the central doctrines of theism are logically inconsistent with one another." — J. L. Mackie (the very author of the argument), The Miracle of Theism, Oxford University Press, 1982, p. 154^[63]

"Some philosophers have contended that the existence of evil is logically incompatible with the existence of the theistic God. No one, I think, has succeeded in establishing such an extravagant claim." — William L. Rowe (atheist philosopher), "The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism", American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 16, no. 4, 1979, p. 335^[64]

"It is now acknowledged on (almost) all sides that the logical argument is bankrupt — but the inductive argument is still very much alive." — William P. Alston (theist philosopher), "The Inductive Argument From Evil and the Human Cognitive Condition", Philosophical Perspectives, no. 5, 1991, p. 29^[65]

This is one of the best-established points of contemporary philosophy of religion on logical ground: in its demonstrative form, the argument from evil no longer suffices to conclude against God's existence. There remains the evidential (probabilistic) argument — which rests on intuitions, never on demonstration — to which the Catholic doctrine of suffering detailed below responds.

Three levels not to be confused

A serious treatment of the matter must distinguish three levels. Mixing them makes the objection more impressive than it really is. The arguments of Be Rational, Become Catholic! deal mostly with the first two levels; Salvifici Doloris and the parable of the Good Samaritan remind us that the third level is not resolved first by a syllogism, but by charitable presence beside the one who suffers^[66][67]. God, Science, and the Proofs likewise ranks the question of evil among the classic objections that a rational enquiry must take seriously, without making it a refutation of the positive proofs of God^[68].

A mystery, not a puzzle

In theology, a mystery is not an obscurity about which nothing could be said: it is an overabundance of meaning that the intellect never exhausts. Refusing to seek to understand suffering on the pretext that it is a mystery would be desertion disguised as humility: the explanation will never be total, but the veil can largely be lifted, and the saints and doctors have lifted it for two millennia.

A warning to the tried reader: what follows enlightens the intellect, but replaces neither presence nor prayer. Christ did not first explain suffering: he went through it. Let him who is in the night read slowly: theory is easier than practice, and no saint has spared himself the interior combat.

If God, who is all love, permits suffering, it is always because he knows he will draw from it a greater good. Catholic mystical tradition distinguishes at least seven — synopsis:

Let us take them up one by one:

1. Making reparation for our faults

Saint Basil recalls that the present time is that of penance and the remission of sins (Short Ascetic Collection)^[69]. Because God is just, our faults must be repaired — either in this life (corrective trials), or in the next (purgatory). Thomas a Kempis: "The whole life of Jesus Christ was but a cross and a long martyrdom, and you seek rest and joy! You deceive yourself, doubt it not […]" (Imitation, Book II, ch. 12, 7)^[70]. And Jesus in the Apocalypse: "Those whom I love, I reprove and chasten" (Rev 3:19)^[71].

2. Bringing us back to our life's goal

Suffering detaches from earth, recalls that we are not eternal, and recentres us on God. How many people, shaken by great sufferings, return to God? "It is good for us to have sometimes troubles and crosses, for they often make a man enter into himself, and make him feel that he is in exile" (T. a Kempis, Imitation, Book I, ch. 12, 1)^[72]. Saint Thérèse of Lisieux writes to her sister Pauline (Mother Agnes) that trials help greatly to detach ourselves from earth and make us look higher than this world (Letter 43B)^[73]. The cannonball that shattered Saint Ignatius of Loyola's leg at Pamplona in 1521 — nailing him to a bed where, for lack of romances, he set about reading Lives of saints — is the archetype.

3. Proving our love to God

Loving God when all goes well is easy. Saint John of Avila teaches that a single "God be blessed" in adversity is worth more than a thousand thanksgivings in prosperity^[74]. Saint Padre Pio recalls that the cross is the pledge of love and the beginning of forgiveness: a love that is not fed and nourished by the cross is but a straw fire^[75].

4. Training us in the virtues

Patience, faith, hope, abandonment, detachment, courage, compassion, heroism — all these virtues, all the finest, are acquired only in suffering.

"The cross disposes the soul to patience. It unites heaven to earth, that is, the soul to God. The virtue of the cross is powerful. When it enters a soul, it has the power to remove the rust of all the things of the world. The cross brings the soul to consider the things of earth as boring, troublesome and contemptible. […]" — Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta, The Book of Heaven, vol. 2, 16 May 1899^[76]

5. Making reparation for our brothers and sisters (communion of saints)

This is the properly Christian dimension of suffering — that of co-redemption. "Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ on behalf of his body, which is the Church" (Col 1:24)^[77]. This is the doctrine of the communion of saints: our sufferings offered up can obtain, through union with Christ's sacrifice, concrete graces for our loved ones, for strangers, for the souls in purgatory.

"Bear these trials with true patience, with sincere sorrow for all that offends me, with ardent love for all that can glorify my name. You will thus make satisfaction for your faults and for those of my other servants. Your pains, made effective by the power of charity, will be able to expiate and to merit for you and for others." — The Eternal Father to Saint Catherine of Siena, The Book of Dialogues, Treatise on Discretion, IV, 7^[78]

This is the singular vocation of victim souls (Marthe Robin, Marie-Marthe Chambon, Luisa Piccarreta), but also, to a lesser degree, of every baptized person: we can all offer the slightest contrariety for the salvation of a loved one. "Salvifici Doloris" puts it in magnificent terms:

Salvifici Doloris teaches that, in the cross of Christ, the Redeemer bound himself to human suffering, and that every man can, in his own suffering, take part in his redemptive suffering (§ 19)^[79].

6. Giving us humility

Humility is one of the most important virtues of the spiritual life; without it, no one can enter Heaven. But "the sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise" (Ps 51:19); and of Jesus, "it was the will of the Lord to crush him" (Is 53:10). Jesus says to Luisa: "Even though I suffer for it, Love drives me to send still heavier tribulations. For, to bring men to enter into themselves, there is no more powerful means than to break them"^[80]. In one week of sickness, one can become humbler than in fifty years of fine reflections on humility.

7. Uniting us to Christ — the "great royal road of salvation"

Last benefit, and the greatest: the cross unites us more closely to Christ, who made it his way. And Henri-Marie Boudon:

"Great security then for all who go by this way, since it is the great royal road of salvation: he who walks in it is well assured. O soul, whoever you are, why do you grieve in this way of the cross? It seems to me I hear all the blessed, who know so well the certain roads of glorious eternity, crying out to you: Fear not, you are well, you go well, you hold the great royal road of heaven." — Henri-Marie Boudon, The Holy Ways of the Cross, Book I, ch. III^[81]

To Padre Pio, Jesus confides that without the cross he would already have abandoned him: it is under the cross that we learn to love, and he gives it only to the souls dearest to him^[82]. And to Marcel Van: "When I have sent interior pains to a spouse, it is a sign that she has a greater love for me. My little child, have you understood?"^[83].

This is the heart of the whole doctrine.

The word Jesus addresses to Luisa Piccarreta is unequivocal: there is but one evil, and that is doing one's own will against God's. That is the very definition of sin. Jesus puts it bluntly to Luisa:

"Not doing My Will is the evil that comprises all evils, and is the collapse of all goods. It is the destruction of happiness, of order, of peace, and the great loss of My divine Kingdom." — Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta, The Book of Heaven, vol. 21, 26 March 1927^[84]

And still more categorically: "All the good in man comes from the fulfilment of My Will in him, and evil comes from the fulfilment of his own" (vol. 16, 10 Nov. 1923)^[85]; "And it is just the opposite for one who lives by his own will — which is the key to hell, to miseries and to inconstancy" (vol. 18, 11 Feb. 1926)^[86]; "All this is caused by self-will which, like deficient air, produces chaos, irregularity, weakness, in short the decline of all that is good in the soul" (vol. 16, 20 Nov. 1923)^[87]. And more dramatically still: "The most deplorable evil is not doing My Will, for when My Will is taken away, the soul dies of cold toward all heavenly goods; it dies of boredom, of weariness, of weakness, because My Will is absent" (vol. 20, 27 December 1926)^[88].

The happiness God wills for us

The positive reverse of this doctrine is luminous: God created us for happiness, and our happiness is in him alone. Jesus reveals it to Luisa with unforgettable intensity:

"My daughter, our Supreme Being possesses the fountain of happiness, which is why only happy things or beings can come forth from us. All Creation possesses this fullness of happiness capable of giving the whole earth a perfect earthly happiness. Adam possessed this fullness of happiness. All was happiness and joy for him and as he possessed My Will within himself, he contained seas of satisfactions, of beatitudes and of endless joys. When he left My Will through sin, joy left him and all created things took back the joys they possessed in their bosom, to give man henceforth only what was necessary, no longer as to an owner, but as to an ungrateful servant. You see therefore that unhappiness does not come from us. We cannot give it since it is impossible to give what one does not possess." — Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta, The Book of Heaven, vol. 34, 2 August 1937^[89]

And elsewhere, in a filial image of infinite tenderness:

"I am like a father who possesses the fullness of every kind of happiness and who wants to make all his children happy. […] I shall be unhappy as long as you do not recover my happiness." — Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta, The Book of Heaven, vol. 13, 5 January 1922^[90]

And again:

"The human will has produced all the evils that formed the unhappy state of the poor creature; it transformed her lot, her fortune. Since I am by nature happy, all that came forth from our creative hands in Creation came with the fullness of happiness; consequently, the eternal joy and happiness that were within as well as without man — all flew away […]." — Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta, The Book of Heaven, vol. 24, 10 July 1928^[91]

All is said in these lines: God is the fountain of happiness, he created man for happiness, it is self-will that turned everything into unhappiness — and the return to the Divine Will is the return to original happiness. Suffering is therefore not written into God's plan: it is the scar of the gap between our will and his.

Consequence: if we were fully in God's Will, we would not suffer

That is the logical conclusion. Suffering does not come from without; it is born of the clash between what happens (which is always, in the last instance, within God's Will) and our self-will opposing it.

This affirmation may seem excessive. Yet it is attested by the whole mystical tradition:

• Before original sin, in Eden, man lived fully in the Divine Will, and he did not suffer (CCC § 376).
• In the promised Kingdom: "There shall be no more death; neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more" (Rev 21:4).
• For the saints on earth: their suffering, because united to God's Will, was no longer ours. Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, despite tuberculosis, writes to her sister Céline: "Let us not believe we can love without suffering, without suffering much […]"^[92]. Saint Padre Pio, despite the stigmata, declares himself so happy even amid suffering^[93]. Saint Mary Magdalene de' Pazzi: "to suffer and not to die". This joy is not pious affectation — it is the logical effect of the Thomist definition: suffering, as suffering (reaction of a thwarted will), is absorbed. There remains pain, which they offer as victim souls for others.

Saint Francis de Sales put it magnificently:

"The cross is from God, but it is a cross because we do not join ourselves to it. For, when one is firmly resolved to will the cross God gives us, it is no longer a cross; it is a cross only because we do not will it. And if it is from God, why then do we not will it?" — St. Francis de Sales, quoted by Saint Jane de Chantal, Conference LXII^[94]

The contemporary tragedy

There lies the whole tragedy of our contemporaries: they accuse God of their misfortunes, whereas so many of these misfortunes come from their own will refusing to unite itself to God's. If they returned to God, if they lived in the Divine Will, they would taste already here below the peace promised to hearts united to God — not the absence of every trial (Christ himself and the martyrs suffered in perfect union with the Father), but, by anticipation, suffering changed into joy as Jesus promises Luisa. Happiness is not in outward conditions: it is in the conformity of the will to God. Christ beseeches humanity, through Luisa's voice, in a shattering page:

"O man, stop, call back into yourself this Will that you have rejected. Little does it care for your evils, it is ready to take possession of you and to form in you its Kingdom, a Kingdom of reign, of peace, of happiness, of glory, of victory for me and for you. O cease wanting to be a slave and to live in the labyrinth of your evils and miseries. For it is not for this that I created you, but to be king of yourself and of all things." — Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta, The Book of Heaven, vol. 30, 8 May 1932^[95]

Saint Alphonsus formulates the same truth in a calmer register:

"He who keeps himself united to God's will enjoys, even here below, a continual peace. 'No evil shall befall the just, come what may' (Prov 12:21). Indeed, our soul can taste no sweeter satisfaction than to see its desires fulfilled. But if it wills only what God wills, it has all it desires, since nothing happens except by God's will." — St. Alphonsus Liguori, Preparation for Death, 36th consideration^[96]

Suffering changed into joy in the Divine Will

The corollary is the tremendous promise Jesus makes to Luisa: in the Divine Will, suffering itself becomes joy. The doctrine is no longer merely "we must hold on" — it becomes a positive promise of interior transformation:

"My daughter, wherever the Divine Will is present one finds the communicative strength of the divine Goods and, like mighty waves, our outpourings of happiness, of light, of strength, etc., which flow over the creatures who possess it. And it has the virtue of changing the nature of the hardest, most painful and bitterest things. Where my divine Fiat is present, the hardest things become sweet, sufferings are changed into joys, bitterness is changed into sweetness, earth becomes Heaven, and sacrifices become conquests. Your example is more than enough to convince you of what I tell you. Look, if my Will were not present in you, nailed to bed as you have been for so many years, without enjoying the sun, the air or the pleasures of earth — you can even say you do not know them — you would have been the most unhappy of creatures. Oh! how hard and bitter your state would have been! Yet, with my Divine Will, it is the happiest of creatures, the most peaceful, mistress of itself, because in it flows the vein of the happiness of my Fiat which knows how to convert all things into endless joys and happiness." — Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta, The Book of Heaven, vol. 25, 6 January 1929^[97]

The case of Luisa herself — nearly sixty years bedridden, feeding practically on nothing but the Eucharist — is here the experimental argument: if she could be happy in that state, it is because nothing is too hard for one who lives in the Divine Will. See the article Luisa Piccarreta for the detailed biography.

It is the image which, in the whole Catholic tradition, makes the doctrine most intelligible: God is the Divine Surgeon, and suffering is his scalpel.

Saint Anthony the Great (3rd–4th century), Father of the desert, had laid it down already in the first centuries in the Philokalia of the neptic Fathers:

"The man truly endowed with reason has but one thing at heart: to obey and please the God of the universe, and to form his soul to the single care of being pleasing to him, giving him thanks for the reality and strength of his providence by which he directs all things, whatever happens, during life. Indeed it would be unbecoming to thank for bodily health the physicians who prescribe bitter and unpleasant remedies for us, while refusing God gratitude for things that seem painful to us, and failing to know that all happens as it should, and for our advantage, through the care of providence." — St. Anthony the Great, Exhortations on the Conduct of Men and Virtuous Behaviour, § 2, in Philokalia of the Neptic Fathers, vol. A1, transl. J. Touraille, Bellefontaine / Éd. du Cerf^[98]

Henri-Marie Boudon (1624–1702, archdeacon of Évreux), in The Holy Ways of the Cross, develops the image with delicacy: "That is why God sends him sufferings, like a good father who makes his sick child, who is very dear to him, take bitter medicines! Alas, his pleasure would be not to give this pain to his child: but supposing his sickness, he is obliged to it; and it is his love that presses him to act thus"^[99].

"Certainly, God, of Himself, is all goodness: His pleasure is to do good, and to fill His dear creatures with blessings. His design, when He created man, was not to make him bear pains, but to make him lead a blessed life in this world and in the next. That is true, looking only at the first state of things; but man having depraved and corrupted himself by sin, he has of himself engaged himself to the pain necessary to draw him out of his corruption, and to restore him to a state of salvation. That is why God sends him sufferings, like a good father who makes his sick child, who is very dear to him, take bitter medicines! Alas, his pleasure would be not to give this pain to his child: but suppose his illness, he is obliged to it; and it is his love that presses him to act thus." : Henri-Marie Boudon, The Holy Ways of the Cross, Book I, ch. V^[100]

First truth: God is all goodness, and his delight is to fill. Second truth: the original plan was a blessed life without pain. Third truth: man himself, through his corruption, incurred pain for his healing. Fourth truth: God sends this pain reluctantly, as a father gives bitter medicine to his child, not from harshness, but from love that wills to heal.

But it is doubtless Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta who gives its most striking formulation:

"I act like a compassionate physician who uses radical remedies to heal his children covered with wounds. What does this physician father who loves his children more than his own life do? Will he let these wounds become gangrenous? Will he let his children die rather than heal them, on the pretext that they might suffer if he used fire or the scalpel? Never! Even if, for him, it is as if he applied these treatments to his own body, he does not hesitate to cut and open the flesh, then apply the antidote or the fire to keep it from becoming further infected. If some of his children happen to die during the operation, that is not what the father wills. He wills to heal them. So it is with Me. I wound my children in order to heal them. I destroy them in order to raise them up again. If a great number of them are lost, that is not My Will. It is the consequence of their wickedness and their obstinate will." — Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta, The Book of Heaven, vol. 2, 25 October 1899^[101]

The whole Catholic doctrine of suffering is contained in this image. The real sickness is our self-will — that "gangrened limb" that would kill us if God, out of Love, did not resolve to cut it off. The suffering we feel on this earth is the anaesthesia, the scalpel, the suture of the Divine Surgeon. Not an evil — an immense grace.

The analogy has concrete force: who would seriously say that a surgical operation is an evil? The scalpel cuts, the anaesthesia puts to sleep, the suture pinches — there is objectively pain, sometimes long, sometimes heavy. And yet, when we leave the operating room, no one says "I have been harmed": we say "my life has been saved". The fleeting pain is wholly absorbed into the greater good it made possible. That is exactly how God acts with us: "when God operates on us, it is profoundly good news", even if it causes pain at the time.

"No one takes it from me": the voluntary gift

Christ's suffering is not of the same nature as ours. Christ had no self-will opposed to the Father's: "Father, not my will, but yours" (Lk 22:42). His suffering is wholly redemptive and voluntary: "No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of myself" (Jn 10:18). It is the archetype of the suffering of a victim soul, where one suffers for others in full union with the divine Will.

The Eternal Father positively willed this redemptive oblation — not the sin of the executioners (which is a secondary cause), but the offering of the Son:

• "It was the will of the Lord to crush him with pain" (Is 53:10).
• "He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all" (Rom 8:32).
• "The plan he had formed in advance" (Acts 2:23).

The Council of Trent: Jesus, by his obedience unto death, "made reparation for our faults and satisfied the Father for our sins" (DS 1529; CCC § 615)^[102]. And St. Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa, III, q. 47, a. 3: the Father delivered Christ to the Passion — out of love, and he is praised for it^[103]. The whole theology of satisfaction, since St. Anselm (Cur Deus Homo), rests on this point.

"O happy fault": the paschal reversal

The Church sings each year at the Easter Vigil in the Exsultet: "O felix culpa, quae talem ac tantum meruit habere Redemptorem" — "O happy fault, that merited such and so great a Redeemer". It is the densest formula of the whole Christian theodicy: God did not will original sin, but he drew from it a greater good — the Incarnation, the Cross, the Redemption, the possibility for man to live eternally united to God in a union closer still than in Eden.

It is the same logic at the scale of each individual life: "Happy suffering that made us take up the Divine Will again."

Christ — paradigm of suffering in God's Will

Christ is thus the paradigm of the second form of suffering — where one no longer suffers for oneself (purification of self-will), but for others in full union with the divine Will. It is the suffering of victim souls, of martyrs, of saints, of the Virgin at the foot of the Cross. It is also, to a lesser but real degree, the suffering of every Christian who offers his daily cross in union with Christ.

"What madness not to submit to God's will! What God wills must be accomplished, for, says Saint Paul, 'who can resist his will' (Rom 9:19)? The wretches who revolt cannot escape the cross, but they bear it without profit and in turmoil. 'Who has resisted him and enjoyed peace' (Job 9:4)?" — St. Alphonsus Liguori, Preparation for Death, 36th consideration^[104]

On 11 February 1984, feast of Our Lady of Lourdes, Saint John Paul II published the apostolic letter Salvifici Doloris — the reference magisterial text on the Christian meaning of suffering, written less than three years after the assassination attempt in Saint Peter's Square (13 May 1981) which the pope himself survived. The document, organized in eight parts and thirty-one paragraphs, articulates the Catholic doctrine of suffering around four axes.

Job — the innocent who suffers

Salvifici Doloris takes as its central paradigm the book of Job:

"It is not true, on the other hand, that all suffering is a consequence of fault […]" — St. John Paul II, Salvifici Doloris, § 11^[105]

The case of Job is paradigmatic: the just man who suffers. The book of Job shows that not all suffering is chastisement; some sufferings are mystery, trial, occasion for deepening love of God. This nuance is essential: it avoids both the simplism of "he sinned, he suffers" and the reverse simplism of "if God existed, there would be no Auschwitz".

"That man may not perish"

"God gives his only Son so that man 'may not perish', and the meaning of this 'may not perish' is carefully specified by the words that follow: 'but have eternal life'. Man 'perishes' when he loses 'eternal life'. The opposite of salvation is therefore not only temporal suffering, suffering of any kind, but definitive suffering: the loss of eternal life, being rejected by God, damnation." — St. John Paul II, Salvifici Doloris, § 14^[106]

This precision is decisive: the true suffering, definitive suffering, is not sickness, bereavement or earthly trial — it is damnation, that is, the definitive loss of God. All the sufferings of this earth, however terrible, are temporal, and God can turn them into goods. Definitive suffering, on the other hand, is that of the soul that will have refused God to the end — the doctrine of hell. The developments on hell remain deliberately brief here: the whole dossier, with its six objections and testimonies, is treated in the complete article on hell, why hell exists.

Co-redemption — Col 1:24

"The Redemption was accomplished through the Cross of Christ, that is, through his suffering" (§ 4); "human suffering […] has taken on a completely new dimension and entered a new order" (§ 18); and "in this dimension all human suffering, by virtue of union in love with Christ, completes the suffering of Christ" (§ 24). — St. John Paul II, Salvifici Doloris, §§ 4, 18, 24^{[107][108][109]}

This is the Pauline doctrine of Col 1:24: "what is lacking in Christ's afflictions I complete in my flesh on behalf of his body, which is the Church." Every Christian can, through baptism, take part in Christ's redemptive suffering — his sufferings offered up become matter for the salvation of others. This is the doctrine of the communion of saints.

The parable of the Good Samaritan — praxis

Finally, Salvifici Doloris anchors the Christian answer to suffering in a concrete praxis — the parable of the Good Samaritan: "The Good Samaritan is every person who stops beside the suffering of another man, whatever it may be" (§ 28). Before suffering, the Christian is not called to explain but to make himself neighbour — to dress wounds, to help, to carry. It is Christ himself who reveals himself in the sufferer: "as you did it to me" (Mt 25; Salvifici Doloris, § 30).

Spe Salvi — "offering up" as a school of hope (Benedict XVI, 2007)

Beside Salvifici Doloris, the encyclical Spe Salvi of Benedict XVI (30 November 2007) adds an indispensable piece to the matter. The pope devotes §§ 36 to 40 to suffering as a place of learning Christian hope — not a disembodied hope, but a hope that passes through the flesh:

"The true measure of humanity is essentially determined in its relation to suffering and to the sufferer. This holds true both for the individual and for society. A society unable to accept its suffering members and incapable of helping to share their suffering and to bear it inwardly through compassion is a cruel and inhuman society." — Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi, § 38^[110]

And above all, Benedict XVI rehabilitates the Catholic practice of "offering up" one's little sufferings — a modest practice post-conciliar catechesis had let drop:

"The idea of being able to 'offer up' the little hardships of everyday life, which continually strike us like irritating 'pricks', thus giving them meaning, was a form of devotion, perhaps less practised today, but still very widespread not long ago. In this devotion there were certainly things that were exaggerated and perhaps even unhealthy, but we must ask whether there was not contained in some way something essential that could be of help. What does 'offering up' mean? These people were convinced that they could insert their little hardships into Christ's great compassion, which thus entered in some way into the treasury of compassion of which the human race is in need." — Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi, § 40^[111]

The theologian pope here joins exactly the Pauline doctrine of Col 1:24 and the spirituality of Luisa Piccarreta: no suffering offered up is lost, because it enters the "treasury" of Christ the Redeemer — and from there, it benefits other souls whom the one who offers it will know only in Heaven.

Gaudium et Spes § 22 — Christ reveals man to himself

Underlying the whole doctrine, the Second Vatican Council gave in Gaudium et Spes (7 December 1965) the formula that became one of the keys of all post-conciliar theology of suffering:

"The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light. […] Christ, the new Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully reveals man to himself and makes his supreme calling clear." — Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et Spes, § 22^[112]

Direct consequence: it is by looking at Christ on the cross — the innocent suffering out of love — that suffering man discovers who he is and what he is called to. Without this Christological horizon, every theodicy remains a mere logical management of the objection; with it, it becomes a call to enter oneself into the paschal mystery.

This section takes up again and deepens the fourth definition (justice/chastisement) — often mishandled in contemporary preaching, which tends to evoke only mercy without justice.

Loving the good means hating what destroys it

Saint Thomas Aquinas defines justice as "a constant and perpetual will to render to each his due" (Summa, II-II, q. 58, a. 1)^[113]. It implies hating what destroys what we love. Jesus says it explicitly to Luisa Piccarreta:

"To love something, it is absolutely necessary to hate the things opposed to it." — Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta, The Book of Heaven, vol. 7, 29 April 1906^[114]

And the Eternal Father to Saint Catherine of Siena: "Light is acquired through the true knowledge the soul has of itself, and from this knowledge comes holy hatred of darkness" (Dialogue, CXLV)^[115]. Scripture expresses it in terrible terms: "He who justifies the wicked and he who condemns the righteous are both alike an abomination to the Lord" (Prov 17:15); and St. Paul: "Is God unjust to inflict wrath? — By no means!" (Rom 3:5-6).

"I wound my children to heal them"

Chastisement, in Catholic doctrine, is not an act of vengeance, but of pedagogy:

"I wound my children in order to heal them. I destroy them in order to raise them up again." — Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta, The Book of Heaven, vol. 2, 25 October 1899^[116]

And Jesus specifies, in a word of poignant tenderness:

"O man, how I love you! If you knew how it grieves me to have to chastise you! But my Justice obliges me to it." — Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta, The Book of Heaven, vol. 2, 14 March 1899^[117]

"Conform yourself to my Justice, for I can no longer hold it back. […] If you knew how I suffer when I deploy my Justice. But it is man himself who forces me." — Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta, The Book of Heaven, vol. 3, 13 November 1899^[118]

Mariam Baouardy: the father who sends his son to prison

Saint Mariam Baouardy (the "Little Arab", Palestinian Carmelite, 1846–1878) summed it all up, in words reported as hers, in a moving image: a father who loves his son corrects him, and, when the son persists in evil, he may go so far as to let him pass through prison to save him.

That is exactly the gesture God makes, in certain extreme cases, in sending chastisements: out of love, for salvation, and suffering himself at having to do it.

A God who did no justice would not be Love

The conclusion imposes itself: a God who did no justice would not be Love. If God were indifferent to the evil done to us, that would not be mercy — it would be contempt for the victims. Because he loves, he cannot tolerate evil indefinitely. This is what grounds the coherence of the doctrine of purgatory and hell (cf. Purgatory and Hell — Answers to Objections).

Objection 1 — "God sends no evil, only secondary causes"

Answer: This formulation is partly true (God never wills sin) but insufficient (cf. above, the "Role of secondary causes" section). It accounts for neither:

• the Cross itself, positively willed by the Father as the means of salvation;
• the direct trials sent by God (Job, Israel's desert, St. Paul's thorn);
• St. Alphonsus' teaching that "sickness, interior desolations, reversals of fortune, the death of our loved ones come directly from God"^[119].

The verb "to send" is used by all approved mysticism (Luisa, Faustina, Marthe Robin, Catherine of Siena) — cutting it out means losing part of the spiritual heritage.

Objection 2 — "But Jas 1:13: God tempts no one"

Answer: Saint James precisely distinguishes temptation (solicitation to sin) from trial (solicitation to good). God never tempts; but he tests, corrects and chastises those he loves, as Heb 12:5-11 explicitly attests: "My son, do not despise the Lord's discipline […] for the Lord disciplines him whom he loves"^[120]. Opposing Jas 1:13 to Rev 3:19 and Heb 12:6 is therefore not exegetically tenable. It is exactly the classic distinction: peirazō (tempting to sin) ≠ peirasmos (trial; in Jas 1:2: "count it all joy when you meet various trials").

Objection 3 — "This image of God repels our contemporaries"

Answer: What repels is not the doctrine of chastisement; it is its caricature — an irascible, petty, vengeful God. The true doctrine, on the contrary, radiates Love: if God chastises, it is exactly like a loving father sending his son to rehab — out of love, to save him, suffering himself at having to do it. When we water it down to make it acceptable, we lose precisely "what touches hearts in depth". The traditional doctrine, when heard to the end, is of unequalled luminosity; it is not despite its demandingness that it evangelizes, it is through its assumed demandingness.

Objection 4 — "What about Auschwitz? The brutal death of a child?"

Answer: This is the most painful objection — the one demanding the most pastoral tact. Three elements of answer:

1. Hold the mystery without renouncing the doctrine. God did not will Auschwitz (moral evil, the sin of the executioners), but he permitted it (secondary causes: the free will of the Nazis; the disorder of original sin). Did he draw from it a greater good? Yes, undoubtedly — even if we see only fragments of it. The martyrs of the camps are its purest proof: Saint Edith Stein (1891–1942, Jewish convert, Carmelite, gassed at Auschwitz on 9 August 1942)^[121], Saint Maximilian Kolbe (1894–1941, died by phenol injection in the Auschwitz starvation bunker on 14 August 1941 after taking the place of a father), and Saint Titus Brandsma (1881–1942, Dutch Carmelite, journalist, died by injection on 26 July 1942 at Dachau, canonized by Pope Francis on 15 May 2022)^[122]. Salvifici Doloris specifies (§ 27) that the "greater good" is often the sanctification of the suffering soul — and that suffices to justify the divine permission.
2. The surgeon image holds even there. The surgeon operating on a terminal cancer does not always save biological life — but he did what he had to do. Likewise, God permits certain evils for eternal goods (sanctification, salvation of the soul, witness) that infinitely surpass the temporal loss.
3. Recognize the limits of our intellect. "To refute the evidential argument, it suffices for us to affirm that it is possible that God has a morally sufficient reason for permitting an evil X, whatever X may be, even if we are not directly aware of that reason"^[123]. That is skeptical theism: it reverses the burden of proof. It is for the atheist to demonstrate that no greater good is possible — an impossible thing.

On the pastoral level, we must also know how to be silent: as Lavagna notes, philosophical arguments become inaudible when we ourselves are going through suffering^[124]. Before a parent who has just lost his child, we do not give a course in theodicy — we keep silent, we pray, we carry with him the cross of Christ which is also his cross.

There remains the most practical question: how to speak of evil, to oneself and above all to others? One can hold a right doctrine and say it at the worst moment, in the worst way.

Never minimize: Job's warning

Faced with pain, the temptation is strong to utter formulas that deny suffering or accuse the sufferer. The book of Job stages precisely this trap: the three friends heap up pious explanations, and God proves them wrong in the end^[125]. To explain too quickly is already to betray.

What must never be said

Some formulas must be banned, because they wound while meaning to console:

• “God needed an angel” : it makes God the author of evil, which faith expressly denies^[126].
• “It is a trial he is sending you” : perhaps, but said too soon, it turns God into a tormentor and crushes the one who suffers.
• “Everything happens for a reason” : true in the light of eternity, false as an immediate answer: it banalizes pain, exactly like the theodicy Ivan Karamazov refuses.
• “Others suffer more”: suffering cannot be compared; this sentence adds guilt to pain.

What can be said, on the other hand: “I am here”, “I don't understand either”, “I am praying for you”, and above all shared silence. Here rightness of tone counts as much as rightness of doctrine.

Presence before arguments

Before one who suffers, one does not argue with an open wound: one who weeps expects a presence, not a theodicy. Benedict XVI recalls in Spe Salvi that to console is to be-with (see above the section on Spe Salvi). The time for explanations, if it comes, will come later; the time for presence is now. On the trial of God's silence see Why does God seem silent?.

"Thy will be done" as remedy

The fundamental practice, which sums up everything, is the one Jesus taught us in the Our Father: "Thy will be done". Sister Marie du Sacré-Cœur Bernaud expresses it thus: our bitterest sufferings come above all from our will's opposition to what afflicts us, and resignation offered in our Fiat is the most effective remedy for wounded hearts (Abide in His Love)^[128].

Concretely: before each contrariety, say interiorly "Thy will be done" — not as a cry of despair, but as an act of union with God's Will which alone can tear suffering from its absurdity and give it meaning.

The pitfall of fatalism

First pitfall: using "it is God's will" as a pretext for passivity. False. God wills us to fight for good and justice! If one is harassed, doing God's will will mean changing schools or leaving one's tormentor. According to a maxim often attributed to Saint Ignatius: "Act as if everything depended on you, knowing that in reality everything depends on God." Both affirmations must hold together: God's will is always accomplished and man does not always accomplish it. Dropping the second leads to passive fatalism, which is also a caricature.

The two propositions to hold together:

A harassed person who remained passive, telling herself it is God's will, would betray Christian thought: God wants her to fight for good and justice, and this fight is his will for her.

The balance is summed up in a formula of the Ignatian tradition^[129]: acting as if everything depended on us, knowing that in reality everything depends on God.

Concretely, two complementary forms of discernment: beforehand, asking God what he wants before deciding; by the closing of doors, deciding reasonably and then praying: Lord, if this is not your will, close the doors. Both suppose action and open to trust.

The pitfall of revolt

Second pitfall: refusing what God permits, accusing God, revolting. Equally false. Saint Paul: "What madness not to submit to God's will! What God wills must be accomplished, for who can resist his will? The wretches who revolt cannot escape the cross, but they bear it without profit and in turmoil"^[130].

The daily offering and the communion of saints

A simple and powerful practice: each morning, offer one's day — joys, sorrows, contrarieties, pains — in union with Christ's sacrifice, for God's intentions and the salvation of souls. This is the morning offering taught by the whole tradition (Pius X, Leo XIII, the Apostleship of Prayer of Saint Francis Xavier). At the moment of a pain, say interiorly: "For those who do not know you, Lord."

That is how suffering acquires its full fruitfulness — that of co-redemption (Col 1:24).

The anointing of the sick — when suffering becomes sacrament

A decisive sacramental practice, the anointing of the sick objectively transforms suffering into a place of grace. The Catechism teaches:

"By the grace of this sacrament the sick person receives the strength and the gift of being more closely united to the Passion of Christ: he is in a certain way consecrated to bear fruit by configuration to the Saviour's redemptive Passion. Suffering, a consequence of original sin, acquires a new meaning: it becomes a participation in the saving work of Jesus." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 1521^[131]

The anointing is not a last resort reserved for the dying: "The Anointing of the Sick is not a sacrament for those only who are at the point of death. Hence, as soon as anyone of the faithful begins to be in danger of death from sickness or old age, the fitting time for him to receive this sacrament has certainly already arrived" (CCC § 1514). It can be received several times in a lifetime. Cf. the article The Anointing of the Sick for ritual and theological detail.

Living suffering in the Divine Will

For those who engage in the spirituality of the Divine Will taught to Luisa Piccarreta, suffering takes on a further dimension: not only offered up (human act), but lived in the single eternal act of Christ — who suffered "for all", in all times and all places at once. This dimension is the subject of the separate article on the Divine Will and the Book of Heaven.

At the end of this journey, let us gather the whole doctrine into a formal syllogism — a tool that can be held up before any objection. Each premise bears its degree of authority: (1) dogma (Creed, CCC); (2) doctrine enlightened by a private revelation; (3) philosophical reason; (4) Catholic doctrine of Providence; (5)-(6) received private revelation (Servant of God Luisa Piccarreta — to be received as such, not as dogma); (7) doctrine of the doctors and saints; (8) Scripture and Magisterium; (9) theological conclusion that follows from them — it does not stand at the same level as the Creed and the CCC.

Premises

(1) [dogma] God is all-powerful (Creed, 1st article; CCC § 268).

(2) [doctrine, enlightened here by a private revelation] God is all love: he wills only our happiness (1 Tim 2:4; Jesus consoling the afflicted Luisa, vol. 13, 5 Jan. 1922: "At all costs, I want to see you happy. I want to see again on your lips the smile that expresses the Beatitude of my Will").

(3) [reason] But what one can do and wills to do, one does (elementary logic of St. Thomas: only the effective will — which also wills the means — obtains its effect, unlike a mere wish without means).

(4) [doctrine] Therefore, nothing happens outside God's will — either positively willed by Him, or merely permitted (allowed to happen for a greater good) (W. Stinissen, Surrender, p. 13).

(5) [private revelation] But the only true evil is doing one's own will against God's Will (Jesus to Luisa, vol. 21, 26 March 1927: "Not doing My Will is the evil that comprises all evils"). All happiness is in the Divine Will; all unhappiness in self-will.

(6) [private revelation] But because he is all love, God does everything to break in us this self-will which is our only true evil — and suffering, in his hand, is the instrument par excellence for doing so (Jesus to Luisa, vol. 2, 24 Oct. 1899: "To bring men to enter into themselves, there is no more powerful means than to break them").

(7) [doctors and saints] But what serves this greater good (our eternal happiness through the destruction of self-will) is not an evil in itself, but a good under the appearance of evil — a bitter-tasting medicine (St. Alphonsus; H.-M. Boudon; St. Augustine: "in his hand, even evil favours the good").

(8) [Scripture and Magisterium] But chastisement is part of what God permits, and even directly wills when every other way is closed by our obstinacy (Rev 3:19; Heb 12:6; Salvifici Doloris § 10). And since it serves this same greater good, it too is, in truth, an act of Love.

Conclusion

(9) [conclusion] Therefore all that God sends or permits — including suffering, including the Cross, including chastisement — is, for one who looks with the eyes of faith, a proof of Love, and so, in truth, good news.

The only true evil is our self-will refusing God; yet God never wills it, but never ceases to do everything to deliver us from it. All the rest — what we call suffering, trial, chastisement — is only the means, sometimes painful but always loving, by which the Father tears us from what kills us, to bring us back to the one thing that makes us live: doing his Will.

Unhappiness is not in what happens to us; it is in our self-will refusing God. And happiness is in the Divine Will alone, already on this earth and for eternity. This is what Saint Alphonsus sums up in a luminous formula:

For Saint Alphonsus, willing what God wills is the only science that gives rest (Conformity to God's Will)^[132].

And Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, at the end of her short life undermined by tuberculosis:

Saint Thérèse writes likewise to her sister Céline: "Let us not believe we can love without suffering, without suffering much […] It is our riches, our livelihood! […] It is so precious that Jesus came down to earth on purpose to possess it" (Letter 89)^[133].

It is this doctrine that kept standing, in real trials, millions of Christians for twenty centuries. Without the deep conviction that all is in God's hand, that no detail escapes his Providence and his Love, the Christian does not hold. With it, he can go through anything in peace.

According to a famous formula, often attributed to Paul Claudel: "God did not come to remove suffering, he did not come to explain it, but he came to fill it with his presence." That is true and beautiful. But "mystery" in theology does not mean "nothing can be said" — it means "overflowing meaning", blinding light. Much can — and must — be said before confessing our ignorance.

That is what this article has attempted to do.

Related articles in Ignispedia:

• The love of God that explains evil and hell : the transversal article, in which the same free love illuminates both mysteries
• The Divine Will — the spiritual doctrine that deeply illuminates the question of suffering.
• The Book of Heaven — Luisa Piccarreta's major work from which the principal mystical quotations of this article are drawn.
• Luisa Piccarreta — biography of the Italian mystic (1865–1947); her very case of nearly sixty years bedridden is a living illustration of the doctrine.
• The Free-Will Argument — the detailed philosophical version of Plantinga's Free Will Defense.
• The Proofs of God's Existence — the rational foundations prior to any theodicy.
• Hell — Answers to Objections — the "definitive suffering" of which Salvifici Doloris § 14 speaks.
• Purgatory — the final purification, temporal prolongation of the purifying dynamism of earthly suffering.
• The Communion of Saints — foundation of co-redemption (Col 1:24) and of offering sufferings for others.
• Saint Annibale Maria di Francia — confessor and ecclesiastical censor of Luisa Piccarreta.