News Item: : Suffer Little Children to Come Unto Me
(Category: Torch of The Faith News)
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Saturday 17 December 2016 - 16:18:40

Suffering - Questions and Answers

One of the countless attractions of Catholicism is the fact that it is the only religion to provide a truly satisfactory and lasting answer to the universal problem of human suffering.

Whilst philosophies like Buddhism or post-modern Mindfulness techniques seem to be preferred by many today, these really only offer self-preserving - and ultimately selfish - attempts to avoid, offset or effectively deny the full brutal reality, and yet potential value, of suffering.

In Catholicism, we are given the gift of God Who suffers with and suffers for us. Before each of us ever were, He had taken on all our sins and sufferings; and thus gained for our sufferings an infinite value, if only we would join them to His with pure and repentant hearts.

In this we glimpse the realities of the root of suffering in the Fall.

Then too, we can access the panorama of the Redemption, the fact that all real love is self-sacrificial, and that Christ's suffering has endowed human suffering with enormous redemptive power, whenever it is willfully joined to His. We thus have the opportunity to embrace suffering, go through it and receive the hope of future resurrection from it.

What a great blessing, too, it is to hold - even hang onto - a Crucifix during times of acute suffering. How beyond description is the consolation of Holy Communion in times of peril. And how comforting to witness the Last Rites being given to a loved one in their hour of need.

Catholicism is very real - it offers tangible support for the extremes of deep darkness, sublime joy and everything else in between.

Mother Angelica sometimes said that, when things were going particularly rough for her, she would look down at the large Crucifix on her Rosary beads and reflect that no-one else can love us as much as Christ does from the Cross. 

When it Really Hits Home

I recall the first Christmas-night after my poor dad had died just 9 weeks earlier. We were watching Sr. Wendy Beckett discussing sacred art on television. Given the proximity of Dad's death, the show's content caused all of my grief to come to the surface once more.

The strange thing was that, even though I felt that this grief would annihilate me, at that moment just a single heavy tear seemed to force itself out of my eye and roll ever so slowly down the length of one cheek. And yet, though solitary, that tear seemed to me to be so vast in size, weight and content as to be bursting with a whole universe of anguished grief, blood and sorrow.

At the very second that this tear emerged and began to furrow its laborious path down down the side of my face, the TV screen was suddenly filled with a sacred image of the Suffering Christ, with just one large tear exiting from one of His eyes.

Though I had previously understood it academically, and of course interiorly in the heart, I grasped in an infinitely deeper way that Christmas-night of 2012, that Christ does indeed suffer with and for us.

The Only Ladder to Heaven

All this being said, none of us likes to suffer. We especially do not like to see children suffer. This is because, in a certain sense, we were not created to suffer; because suffering is a punishment brought on by the Fall, our own personal sins and the sins of others. We live, down here, in a fallen world. However, by the power of His Cross and Love, Christ can transform our suffering into something life-giving, if we cooperate with His grace.

No wonder that Blessed Sr. Maria Restituta Kafka refused to remove the crucifixes from the wards in the hospital where she served when the Nazi Gestapo ordered her to do so. For that heroic act, and refusing to leave her religious order, she was executed under trumped-up charges of high treason to the German fatherland.

Like St. Rose of Lima before her, Blessed Sr. Kafka understood that, apart from the cross, ''there is no other ladder by which we may get to Heaven''.

Wasted Opportunities

Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen sometimes remarked that he hated to think of all the wasted suffering that went on in hospitals, because the patients had never received encouragement or support to join their suffering to Christ's on the Cross.

Catholics all over the world were similarly disappointed in January 2015 when Pope Francis seemed unable to offer a presentation of the Theology of the Cross to two young girls, and 30,000 other young people who had travelled to greet him, at Manila in the Philippines.

When two distressed former street children asked Francis through their tears why children suffer, he suggested that the nucleus of the question did not have an answer. Touchy-feely types rejoiced at the time, that Francis did not blind them with theology but basically gave them a hug instead. Still, his response disappointed countless Catholics who hoped for something a little more concrete, lasting and, we must say Catholic, from a reigning pontiff. Lovingly sharing with the grief of others is an essential part of answering human suffering - perhaps this is something many traditional Catholics need to learn - but it can not be a replacement for the theological answers.

It was not only Catholics who were bemused. At the time, the Philippine Star ran a headline suggesting, Pope Stumped: Why does God allow children to suffer? Even the liberal National Catholic Reporter - wittily nicknamed the ''Distorter'' by some othodox Catholics in the USA - headed up their story with, Francis stuggles to answer crying girl's question about suffering.

Suffer Little Children

Any hopes that this Philippine failure to engage with the mysteries of theodicy had been a momentary lapse were finally squashed this week when Pope Francis met with medical support staff and 150 young patients from Rome's Bambino Gesu children's hospital, in the Pope Paul VI hall.

As the transcript over at La Stampa's Vatican Insider reveals, this meeting provided another opportunity - is that the right word? - to hear Pope Francis speaking in the kind of coarse manner which has not previously been associated with reigning pontiffs.

For example, at one point he acknowledged the weariness that can be experienced by hospital staff by suggesting: ''I can end the day all sweaty, tired and feeling like I want to tell someone where to stuff it.''

As we said a couple of times last week, Francis' coarse speech does little for the popular conception of the sublime dignity of the papacy.

Although there were touching moments with sick children, and some of his other words to the hospital staff did contain positive elements, it was distressing to hear Francis' renewed discussion of the suffering of children.

When Pope Francis was asked by the paediatric nurse Valentina Vanzi about the suffering of children, he replied: ''I have no answer to this question. Nor has Jesus given an answer to these words. There is no answer to this question, all we can do is look at the crucifix and let this give us the answer.''

Whilst the advice to ''look at the crucifix'' offers a good start in the direction of a fully Catholic answer, it is lamentable that Francis not only failed to develop this, but again suggested that there is no answer.

Worse than this followed, when he continued: ''... is God unjust? He was unjust with His Son when He sent Him to the Cross, if we follow this logic then we have to say this.''

Even the most basically catechized of Catholics could tell you that this is a gravely misleading caricature of orthodox teaching. Indeed, it sounds to me like blasphemy.

God is perfect Justice and perfect Mercy. It is because of this perfection that He sends His Son to save us from our sins and injustice, by taking on the punishment that is due to us for our sins, in order to restore us to the Father by His self-sacrificial love.

Francis' phrase ''if we follow this logic'' reveals a flawed first principle, which causes his subsequent answers to be wrong. This is a basic rule of philosophy.

Further than that, his use of that phrase - ''if we follow this logic'' - does not sound like the kind of thing a Catholic would say about the Cross, but rather what an atheist, a secular humanist or perhaps maybe a Jew would say.

Given that perspective, Francis' concluding words in his ''answer'' are similarly disconcerting. He said: ''But it is our human existence, our flesh, that suffers in that child and when one suffers, people do not speak, they weep and pray in silence.''

Again, although there is a time to weep and pray silently before the mystery of suffering, there is also a time to speak Christ's truth for the salvation and sanctification of souls.

If ever there were such a time, it is when little children need reassurance of God's Divine Providence and the great value their suffering as innocents can have in Christ.

Any good doctor, nurse or medic would be startled to hear a hospital visitor telling dying children that, really, there was no answer to their suffering; and that God was unjust even to His own Son!

Good grief, right-thinking medical staff would seize such a person and have them thrown off a hospital ward to maintain the psychological serenity, physical strength and spiritual well-being of their charges.

There is Something Wrong in Denmark!

There is something very wrong when a pontiff speaks in this way.

And that something is not unconnected to the post-Amoris Laetitia collapse which now sees: numerous Canadian bishops sacrilegiously signing up to give the Last Rites to those choosing euthanasia; a Spanish Archbishop sacrilegiously ordaining a known sodomitical pairing to the sacred priesthood; an Australian Archbishop sacrilegiously allowing a formerly beautiful Catholic sanctuary to be used as a venue for an impure fashion show and then unrepentantly defending his actions; the Bishop of San Diego sacrilegiously promoting homosexual ideology in his diocese; or so many other examples of these kinds of things which are now breaking out like filthy boils all over the place.

There is now just over one week until we greet the Christ Child at Christmas. May God give us the grace to prepare our hearts; and to defend His Church and the rights of His little ones come what may in the days ahead.

But Jesus, calling them together, said: Suffer children to come to me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God (Luke 18:16). 

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This news item is from Torch of The Faith
( http://www.torchofthefaith.com/news.php?extend.1498 )