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Good evening Father Angelo,

My name is Antonio. I do not know the reason for my writing, maybe I wish you could explain what is afflicting me, even if I doubt it.

I am a young boy, nearly 22 years old and I have always lived trying to follow the moral precepts of the Church and God’s Will. 

This year has been the most difficult of my entire life, I had to go through deep sorrow and sufferings with apparently no other transcendental meaning. All of a sudden, I saw my grandfather dying without being able to do anything, I have been profoundly deluded by a catholic girl whom I loved deeply ( who in the end has become engaged with an anticlerical atheist who is not even that handsome ) and I had endured personal humiliations in vain.

When I broke up with my ex, I decided not to see her again and focus only on my faith. Still, God moved me to help her instead ( since a communal friend told me ) in her faith crisis, even if that meant I had to accept that she was with someone else who was also driving her in that direction. Nonetheless, I did it – I used to say to myself that if I had loved her, I had had to help her even if that would have been painful- but I have just ended up suffering even more to the point I was completely drained, wishing all that sorrow would just vanish.

I asked what was the meaning of it? Why should I suffer so much in vain? Why did God make me fall in love with a girl with whom there is no future and insist I should carry on supporting her without moving on? What did I do to deserve this? Didn’t I try to serve the Lord with all my strength?

On the contrary misery, it is what I have received. I have never righteously asked for a prize but I am fed up continuously experiencing that the people who do not deserve them are those who get them ( do not tell me that all of us deserve to go to Hell, otherwise nobody should ever be granted anything). It is not right.

This does not happen to me just because I am a Christian- since other Christinas  around me are not doing so badly- but it does happen only to me. Why have I to go through such a strict standard and not the other? Do you know what petitions God granted me? Those in which I asked not to take away the reason for my suffering but to give me  the strength to endure it.

For months, not one of my prayers had been granted (not even when I asked for conversions)  and, at a certain point, I gave up, I started hating who I was, all the moral and religious values which I used to profess that had become for me as mere fairy-tails and illusions in the meantime.

I reached the point of even selling my soul to the devil, not because I believed he could give me what I wanted, but out of despise and hate for myself and God, since I would always try to come back even if God never did anything for me.

Up to now, I have obtained nothing, maybe because I already know that it is not possible to sell what I do not own (the soul). I have lost my trust in God, as it is He who abandoned me, not I.

All my life I dedicated to Him, going to Mass every day, reading the Holy Scriptures and the lives of the Saints, using my intelligence ( I am graduating in Philosophy) to defend the Catholic faith and publicly denouncing all the contemporary errors ( such as abortion, the gender ideology etc), being extradited by mates and friends, I even considered the possibility to pursue a religious life. Many people in my parish used to admire my strong faith and generosity. God was everything to me.

Where has God been? How could He abandon me like that? How could He allow all of that to happen, knowing that it would have brought me where I am?  He must not care about me or hate me since the only thing He has granted me so far is the strength to endure suffering, and I cannot even admit He does not exist as it would be against Reason. It could sound as if I am upset just because I did not get what I wanted, but I did not ask for my wishes to be granted ( to stay with the girl I loved, for example), but simply to remove them from my heart. Not even that, even though it was certainly in His power!

As my confessor said, “ It does not make sense what you have been through. It is just love”. If that is true it means either that God is not all good or omnipotent. Do you, Father Angelo, want to know the irony in this? Even when I was furious about all that was happening to me, I used to stand up straight away against those people who criticized the Christian Faith and the  Church, to the point it became my habit and, at the same time, it would irritate me even more since it revealed how God was unjust with me without granting what should have been mine by right.

For once, He could have granted my “egoistic” desire ( conceived not long back), but He did not. When I asked Him to remove it from within me , ( the desire to love and be loved ) not even that He wished to grant me. What does God want from me? Does He enjoy seeing me in pain? Why doesn’t He end my life if He hates me so much? I admire the Saints who chose to suffer out of Love. For them, it was a matter of a voluntary choice and useful ( to save souls) and valuable, not like mine since for me it was more like an imposition by Him. It is not right, He is a tyrant and despot.

I could carry on like this, but it would be too long and useless. I beg you, if you read and answer, not to provide traditional answers ( I have read the Summa Theologiae, Summa Contra Gentiles, the Bible etc..) as they would not resonate with me. I now doubt there could be a rational explanation for this, anyway.

Father Angelo replies:

Dear Antonio,

1-I do understand your sorrow both  for your grandfather’s passing and your sentimental disappointment.

Nonetheless, accusing God of being  a tyrant and despot  is out of place. Especially for someone who dedicated his life to the Lord.

2-You said to have read the whole Summa Theologiae, the Summa contra Gentiles, the Bible etc.. I do not doubt it but what has been the point?

At the beginning of the Summa Theologiae, St. Thomas says  “Christian teaching is necessary for the salvation of man (ad humanam salutem, Saint Thomas, Summa Theologica, I, 1, 1).”

Human salvation consists in leading man to God.

If after reading the Theological Summa you put God under accusation, I can say: “Yes, yes. You read it all. But you have not penetrated into God. Since human health consists precisely in this.”

3-The same logic applies to the Sacred Scriptures , in which we found  words of eternal life  and where Jesus Christ, the true treasure hidden  in the field, for whom one shall dispose of everything else , has been revealed.

Have you given away everything to buy that same field ?

Or have you disregarded it ?

4-I do believe that in this apparent silence, God wanted to strongly talk to your heart. You say that God has abandoned you , as if it was not Him who is actually nurturing your existence even now as you read , giving you the ability  to read, think, love and act!

The reality is that you have become so distant from Him that you no longer see Him. And now that you’ve moved away you accuse Him of abandoning you!

Saint Augustine said: “Deus non deserit, non prius deseratur” (God does not abandon unless He is first abandoned).

5-Is it not that being in communion with Jesus Christ, the Fount of eternal life in this same life, is a bigger gift than staying with a girl who suddenly broke up with you for another boy and clearly showed you how empty her soul was as she did not possess God?

Was it her soul to fascinate you?

How wonderful it would have been if through her encounter you had received in an even more definitive and unchangeable manner the most precious gift of all: God!

For you, who have read the entire Theological Summa, the Summa against the Gentiles and the Holy Scripture, isn’t God the ultimate goal of all affections and feelings?

This girl couldn’t root you more in Christ because she didn’t have him first. No one gives what he does not have (no one can give what they don’t have).

6.While reading your email, I had the impression that the Lord wanted to address to you this passage from the Apocalypse : “17 For you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing; not knowing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. 18 Therefore I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire, that you may be rich, and white garments to clothe you and to keep the shame of your nakedness from being seen, and salve to anoint your eyes, that you may see. 19  (Rev 3,17-19).

None of these five adjectives is additional .

7.You say that “to defend the Catholic faith and publicly denounce all the contemporary errors ( such as abortion, the gender ideology etc)..”

But the errors of modernity such as abortion and gender ideology are not primarily a matter of faith.

Reason is enough to recognize that killing a child in its mother’s womb is a crime!

Likewise, there is no need to bother faith to say that sexual identity is written from the first moment of our existence in the structure of our being, which is indelible and which precedes the awakening of consciousness, whereby one discovers oneself genetically and morphologically male or female.

When you defended those values ​​you did only one thing: you tried to reason and make people think.

8. What do I recommend?

What God says in the passage from the apocalypse that I reported to you: “Therefore I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire, that you may be rich, and white garments to clothe you and to keep the shame of your nakedness from being seen, and salve to anoint your eyes, that you may see.” (Rev 3,18).The white dress to cover your shameful nakedness is the sanctifying grace that brings the presence and personal possession of God into you.

Eye drops are “..His anointing teaches you about everything” (1 John 2:27) and which leads you to say with Job: “I put my hand over my mouth. I spoke once, but I will not reply, twice I spoke, but I will not continue“Behold, I am of small account; what shall I answer thee?I lay my hand on my mouth.5 I have spoken once, and I will not answer; twice, but I will proceed no further.” (Gb 40,4-5).

9. The Lord continues in the Apocalypse by saying: “Those whom I love, I reprove and chasten; so be zealous and repent.” (Rev 3:19). 

They are words that recall those that are read more widely in the letter to the Jews: 

 “Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or faint hearted. 4 In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood. 5 And have you forgotten the exhortation which addresses you as sons?—“My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord,nor lose courage when you are punished by him.6 For the Lord disciplines him whom he loves,and chastises every son whom he receives.”7 It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons; for what son is there whom his father does not discipline?” (Heb 12,3-7).

The Bible you read teaches you this too!

10. That God, who is more intimate with you than you are with yourself and who never tires of seeking you even though you have abandoned him, finally says to you: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if any one hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me” (Rev 3:20).

He stands at the door of your heart with a friend who eagerly waits for it to open to him.

He knocks with his inspirations and also through the events of life for you to open to him.

He will have dinner with you. He will not come empty-handed.

I hope that you too can then conclude together with Saint Augustine: “How sweet did it at once become to me, to want the sweetnesses of those toys! and what I feared to be parted from, was now a joy to part with. For Thou didst cast them forth from me, Thou true and highest sweetness. Thou castest them forth, and for them entered in Thyself, sweeter than all pleasure, though not to flesh and blood; brighter than all light, but more hidden than all depths, higher than all honour, but not to the high in their own conceits. Now was my soul free from the biting cares of canvassing and getting, and weltering in filth, and scratching off the itch of lust. And my infant tongue spake freely to Thee, my brightness, and my riches, and my health, the Lord my God. (Confessions, IX,1).

I wish you all the best, I bless you and I remember you in prayer.

Father Angelo