CSF February 2023: Christian meaning of suffering

Roots of suffering seen in reality of evil

BY SIMONE RIZKALLAH

Director of Program Growth at Endow Groups

This is the second in a series of seven meditations examining the Christian meaning of suffering according to the thought of Pope St. John Paul II in his 1984 apostolic letter, “Salvifici Doloris.”

The Holy Father, Pope Saint John Paul II, ends this second part of his letter with sobering words: “One thinks, finally, of war” (Paragraph 8, “Salvifici Doloris”). And we know he was no stranger to war. He was born only two years after the end of the First World War and survived the Second World War when many of his fellow clandestine seminarians, as well as Polish clerics, were murdered.

Papal biographer George Weigel has often noted in his lectures a letter that John Paul II wrote to theologian Henri de Lubac in which the Holy Father observed that the “pulverization of the human person” in the 20th century was caused by what he called “an anthropological mess.” In other words, the root of the problem of evil, which took form in the atrocities committed by the Nazis and communists, was a philosophical one. Their flawed understanding of the human person (that man is not intrinsically valuable) is what gave them license to dispose of “undesirables” at will.

But what causes suffering?

John Paul II writes, “Man suffers on account of evil, which is a certain lack, limitation or distortion of good” (Paragraph 7, “Salvifici Doloris”). Christian tradition has always defined evil as a negative

reality, meaning that evil cannot “stand alone” without its relationship to the good because it is always in some way an absence or a dismantling of the good which ought to be present.

Interestingly, the Old Testament doesn’t have two different Hebrew words for “suffering” and “evil.” The same word is used to signify both the reality of evil and of suffering. But there is a distinction between the two which is evident in the Greek New Testament. In the Greek, the verb “suffer” is understood as I experience, I am affected, etc., which more clearly shows us the distinction between the cause (which is the evil) and the experience of it, the lack of the desired good (which is the suffering). Therefore the answer to the question, “Why do we suffer?” is a difficult yet simple one. We suffer because of the reality and experience of evil.

And yet, for the Christian, “the world of suffering possesses as it were its own solidarity.” It is in the context of this solidarity, this shared “trial,” this “need for understanding and care” that we can continue the most noble of human efforts: to continue grappling with “the persistent question of the meaning of suffering” (Paragraph 8, “Salvifici Doloris”). ■

Endow is a nonprofit organization that connects like-minded women and helps them access with ease the rich theological inheritance of the Catholic Church for the cultivation of the feminine genius through 8- to 12-week study groups based on important documents of the Catholic Church. For more information, please visit www.endowgroups.org.

Consider studying John Paul II’s apostolic letter “Salvifici Doloris” by hosting an 8-, 10or 12-week session Endow Group.

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