Suffering as Teacher

The question the Church refuses to answer glibly

Why does an all-good, all-powerful God permit suffering? The Catechism's honesty here is bracing: to this question, “as pressing as it is unavoidable,” no quick answer will suffice (CCC 309). Anyone selling you a one-sentence solution is selling something.

What the Catechism says instead is that only the whole of Christian faith — creation, fall, covenant, Incarnation, Cross, Resurrection — constitutes the answer, and that there is no part of the Christian message that is not, in part, a response to the problem of evil (CCC 309). The answer, in other words, is not a proposition. It is a story you are inside of, and a Person.

One anchor the Church does plant firmly: God permits evil only because He is powerful and good enough to bring good even out of it — a truth we can state now but will see whole only at the end (CCC 311–314). Joseph said it to the brothers who sold him: “You thought evil against me: but God turned it into good” (Genesis 50:20). Between the evil and the good, though, there may be years. Joseph spent them in a pit and a prison. The teaching is not that the years don't hurt.

What suffering is not

Before asking what suffering can teach, clear the rubble of what it does not mean.

It is not, ordinarily, a punishment. The disciples asked Jesus about a man born blind: who sinned, this man or his parents? “Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents” (John 9:3). Job's friends — who explained his agony as divine payback — are Scripture's portrait of how not to comfort, and God Himself rebukes them for it (Job 42:7). Israel had already learned that illness falls on the innocent too, and the Catechism traces that long education in the mystery (CCC 1502). Your cancer is not God's verdict on you.

It is not proof of God's absence. The Psalms — the prayer book Jesus prayed — are full of protest: “Why hast thou forsaken me?” (Psalm 22:1), a cry Christ Himself took onto the Cross (Matthew 27:46). In Scripture, complaint is a form of faith. You may bring God your anger; the saints did, at volume.

It is not something God watches from a distance. This is Christianity's scandalous distinctive. God did not send an explanation of suffering. He came down into it — betrayal, torture, asphyxiation, death — and the Church has never worshipped an unscarred God since.

What Christ did to suffering

The Catechism puts it with precision: by His Passion, Christ took on suffering's worst and gave suffering a new meaning — it can now configure us to Him and unite us with His redemptive work (CCC 1505).

John Paul II — writing three years after an assassin's bullets nearly killed him — devoted an entire apostolic letter to this: Salvifici Doloris, on the Christian meaning of human suffering. Its center of gravity: in the Cross, human suffering itself has been redeemed (Salvifici Doloris 19). Suffering did not become good. It became usable — raw material grace can work with, a place where a person gradually discovers that Christ was already sharing in their suffering before they thought to share in His (SD 26).

This is what St. Paul means in a verse that has startled readers for two thousand years: “I... fill up those things that are wanting of the sufferings of Christ, in my flesh, for his body, which is the church” (Colossians 1:24). Nothing is lacking in Christ's sacrifice — but He leaves room, deliberately, for ours to be joined to it. Pain offered becomes intercession.

What “offer it up” actually means

Generations of Catholic grandmothers compressed Salvifici Doloris into three words: offer it up. Badly explained, it sounds like a command to stop complaining. Properly understood, it is among the most empowering sentences a suffering person can hear.

To offer suffering up is to take what you did not choose and make it a gift — to consciously unite your pain with Christ's offering on the Cross, for someone: a wayward son, the souls in purgatory, the stranger in the next hospital bed. It turns a patient into a priest of their own pain. The Morning Offering exists precisely to make this a daily habit rather than a heroic occasion.

It does not mean refusing painkillers, hiding your grief, or performing serenity. Christ wept at Lazarus's tomb (John 11:35) — then raised him. The offering is made in the pain, not instead of feeling it.

What suffering can teach — and what it cannot do alone

Be honest: suffering is not automatically ennobling. The same fire that softens wax hardens clay. Untended, pain curdles into bitterness — the difference lies not in the suffering but in what meets it: grace, community, honesty. Met with those, the saints testify to a strange curriculum:

• ◆Dependence. Illness makes a person perceive their limits, the Catechism observes, and can begin a search for what actually holds them (CCC 1500–1501). Self-sufficiency dies first — and it was always a fiction.
• ◆Compassion. The deeply suffered become the ones who can sit with the suffering without flinching. Your worst chapter is often your future credential for mercy.
• ◆Detachment. Pain loosens the grip on what was never load-bearing — status, plans, the illusion of control — and leaves the hands free for God.
• ◆Prayer without pretense. Suffering burns off performance. St. Paul begged three times for his thorn to be removed and received instead: “My grace is sufficient for thee; for power is made perfect in infirmity” (2 Corinthians 12:9).
• ◆Solidarity with Christ. Padre Pio carried visible wounds for fifty years; St. Peregrine is invoked by cancer patients because he was one. The saints who suffered most are the ones the suffering instinctively trust.

What to actually do inside suffering

Doctrine consoles at altitude; days are lived on the ground. In the middle of it:

1. 1Keep the sacraments close. Confession when guilt — real or false — piles on; the Eucharist for strength. And if illness is serious, ask for the Anointing of the Sick: the Church's sacrament for exactly this, which strengthens, consoles, and unites the sick person to Christ's Passion (CCC 1520–1523). You do not need to be dying to receive it.
2. 2Pray as you can, not as you can't. One psalm, one decade of the Rosary, one honest sentence. God is not grading.
3. 3Let yourself be carried. Accept the casseroles, the rides, the prayers. Refusing help is not strength; the Body of Christ is designed to bear weight — “Bear ye one another's burdens” (Galatians 6:2).
4. 4Guard the basics. Sleep, food, gentle movement, daylight. Despair grows fastest in an exhausted body.
5. 5Bring in professionals where the wound needs them. Grief that will not lift, trauma, depression — these deserve a good therapist as surely as a broken leg deserves a surgeon. Grace works through them too.
6. 6Offer it, in your own words, at your own pace. One sentence in the morning is enough: “Lord, whatever today costs, I join it to your Cross — for them.”

The teacher's last lesson

Suffering's final lesson is that it does not get the last word. “The sufferings of this time are not worthy to be compared with the glory to come” (Romans 8:18) — not because the sufferings are small, but because the glory is that large. Every Christian claim about pain rests on an empty tomb; without the Resurrection, the Cross would just be one more Roman execution.

No one would choose this teacher. But many, looking back, find they met God in suffering at a depth that comfort never reached — not because pain is good, but because He is in it. “In the world you shall have distress: but have confidence, I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).

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