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Question

Dear Father Angelo,

Good morning and good Sunday, last time I wrote to you in order to clarify some theological and philosophical questions. Today I write to you again for an existential question because in this period I’m disappointed by God, I don’t feel him like before anymore, I don’t think that He loves me in the same way that He loves others. Why does he create deaf and sick people from birth? I used to defend God but now I don’t defend Him anymore, I don’t want to go to the Mass anymore and attend the parish. Before I didn’t agree with those  who say that God punishes people from their birth because of the original sin, but now I agree with them. 

I ask you two questions:

1) Why does God create sick people and why if someone is looking for happiness and luck is condemned to sadness?

2) Why does God love somebody more than  somebody else?

Thank you, I ask you also for a prayer for me and my family and particularly for my father, my aunt and a friend of mine who is suffering.

Good Sunday and  to you soon .

Answer of the priest

Dear friend,

1. I understand your close proximity to people who suffer from pain or  disability since birth.

This  gives you credit.

2. However the question, as you’ve formulated it, is wrong at the start because the concept of creation means making something out of nothing.

Then, if God would make people out of nothing, we can say that it’s not fair.

But God did not create our bodies in which we inhabit. We received these bodies from our parents.
At the moment of conception God creates the soul but He doesn’t create the bodies.

3. We give the possibility that some bodies are generated with disability to the fact that nature  has been corrupted because of the original sin.

So we must not attribute the “guilt” of disabilities to God, neither to the parents, nor  to who is conceived. 
This is what we can also deduct  from the Gospel of John, chapter 9:”As he passed by he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ Jesus answered, ‘Neither he nor his parents sinned; it is so that the works of God might be made visible through him” (John 9, 1-3).
God allows illnesses in order to fulfill a superior plan; but we don’t see that plan now.
This is what the Lord implies when He says:“It is so that the works of God might be made visible through him”.

These “works of God” do not necessarily show themselves into the present life.

But anyway they will show themselves in the future life and then we’ll be able to see that some of the last ones  will become first (that is they’re in Heaven), while some of the first will be last (that is they are in Hell).

4. We must never forget that this life is not the only life nor the last, but this life is the second-to-last.

And our judgements on the present life are  fairer only through  the light of the future life.

Also in this sense Jesus said: “What profit would there be for one to gain the whole world and forfeit his life? Or what can one give in exchange for his life?” (Matthew 16,26).

5. As regards to the second question I can equally answer that it is wrongly formulated because God loves everyone with the same act of love, which is an infinite, eternal and supernatural act of love.

Theologists say that God does not love with many acts, as we do, but with a unique act.

Indeed, with the unique act through which He loves Himself He also loves us.

6. However there is something right in your question because God does not love as we love.

We love because we are attracted by the good we find into a certain thing.

Instead God loves infusing the good into realities.

Given that not all realities have the same goods, we can say that some realities are more loved than others.
In this sense Our Lady was loved more because She has been full of grace from the first moment of Her existence.
Also Apostles were loved more.

7. Nevertheless God does not do us wrong, because we have not the right to be as Our Lady or as the Apostles.

Only in the next life we will know the reason why God gives someone more than He gives to others.

Saint Augustine said:”Don’t want to ask yourself if you don’t want to make mistakes”.

We will understand in the next life.
The textual statement in latin of Saint Augustine is: “Quare illum trahat et illum non trahat, cur istum trahat et illum non trahat, noli velle iudicare se non vis errare” (Commentary on the Gospel of Saint John, Sermon 26,2).
In English: “Why does God draw someone and not draw someone else, why does God draw this one and does not draw that one, you do not pretend to judge if you do not want to make mistakes”.

While waiting to know it in Heaven, where we wish to go, I greet you, I remember you in my prayer and I bless you.

Father Angelo