Dear Father Angelo,

First of all I would like to thank you for the service you carry out with your clarifications on many aspects of the Christian life. I would like to ask you a somewhat delicate question that is difficult for me to answer because I know that Faith is powerfully involved… How can God’s love be justified with respect to the disease that often affects especially young people? How can suffering and then death be permitted by the God of life? Surely original sin and Christ’s victory over death come into play on the theological level… but how can one accept this condition of suffering in practical terms? What to say to someone in despair over the loss of a loved one? If I think how many people love life and disease takes it away from them, where is justice? Where is Christ in all this? It is a question that people will certainly have asked you many times… I admit that despite being a fervent believer, these questions leave me a little perplexed… While waiting for your answer, I ask you to remember me in your prayers and I thank you in advance.

Manuele

Dear Manuele,

1. This is a question that in one way or another has already come up. And it is a question that will come up even later and will always come out because suffering accompanies every man. In the encyclical Salvifici doloris, John Paul II observes that suffering “is a universal theme that accompanies man at every degree of geographical longitude and latitude: it, in a certain sense, coexists with him in the world, and therefore requires be constantly revived” (SD 1).

2. In the face of suffering, and especially in the face of the suffering of children and the innocent ones, everyone becomes pensive and wonders why. Here too, as John Paul II pointed out, man instinctively poses his questions to God: “Man does not ask this question to the world, although suffering often comes from it, but he poses it to God as to the Creator and as to the Lord of the world” (SD 9). Even the atheist does so. And in this respect Leon Bloy, who played a significant part in the conversion of Raissa and Jacques Maritain, was right in saying that suffering has the task of awakening the presence of God in the soul.

3. You ask: “Where is justice in the suffering child?” One might say: there is no justice. In no way suffering can be justified in a child. Those who are not believers and have an immanent vision of life (that is, think that this is the only life to live) at this point closes the discussion and can no longer go on. The Council rightly says that “the enigma of pain and death and outside its Gospel oppresses us” (Gaudium et spes, 22). Only the light of Christ, only Faith (and here by Faith we mean the theological one and only the Christian is theological) illuminates this reality.

4. Now the light of Christ reminds us that “in the bosom of the present life, another is being prepared, whose importance is such that in its light one must express one’s own judgments” (congregation for the doctrine of the Faith, De abortu procurato (18.11.1974), n. 25). If the present life were the only one, seeing a suffering child would be the biggest scandal. But if this life is a function of another, if this life prepares another, then everything changes.

5. Christ teaches us to evaluate the present life in terms of the future one for which we prepare by conforming our way of loving with that of God. Yes, only those who expand in the love that makes themselves a gift enter into God who is Love. Then we understand what John Paul II wrote at the end of his encyclical on suffering. Incidentally, I like to remember that he wrote it after the attack, after having experienced this reality in a singular way. Well, he said that “suffering is present in the world to release love, to give birth to works of love for neighbours, to transform all human civilization into the civilization of love… At the same time, Christ taught man to do good with suffering and to do good to those who suffer. In this twofold aspect, he fully revealed the meaning of suffering” (SD 30).

6. About the question: “where is justice? Where is Christ in all this?” it is answered by saying that it is a pagan question, which evaluates only in the horizon of this world and which seeks God as a deus ex machina, a god exclusively according to human needs, the needs of this world. But such a God does not exist. It is therefore a question that leads nowhere. It leaves in the dark as before. Indeed, in a certain respect it sharpens it even more. Because the darkness, in addition to suffering, is also about a God who does not exist. The pagan God does not exist.

7. The only answer is that which comes from Christ, the only light that illuminates the darkness of human questions and answers. In the story of his death and his glorious resurrection and ascension to Heaven he makes us understand his teaching: “And indeed, some who are last will be first, and some who are first will be last” (Lc 13,30). And they will always be. What matters then is that which always lasts, for all eternity. Then from the light of Christ all human criteria are overturned. Those whom we consider last and subjects of injustice are those who are closest to God from there and are crowned forever. And those that we here consider first, because they are well and enjoy power, and maybe they are of grace, over there will be last. If the children who have suffered here and are now in Heaven could speak, they would not at all say that it was an injustice.

8. Finally, if you really want to answer the question: “Where is Christ in all this?” for a Christian the answer is clear: “Christ is there, in the suffering child”. He is in the child who suffers and gives himself, as the holy children of Fatima did. They were last this way. They did not even reach adolescence. From a human point of view their life was broken and wiped out before it began to blossom and bear fruit. Beyond, they are forever among the first ones. While many of those who were the first on this side are last, that is, out of Paradise, where “there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Mt 8,12).

9. Still: Jesus is in the child who suffers and asks for love, asking for dedication. In this way he releases love in many adults who, precisely in this dedication, rediscover the meaning of the present life, which is not that of enjoying but of giving. And so he helps them “to set aside a good capital for the future to gain real life” (1 Tm 6,19).

Thank you for the question you asked me. I wish you well, I gladly remind you to the Lord and I bless you.

Father Angelo

Translated by Rossella Silvestri

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