TYLER, Texas (ChurchMilitant.com) – A Texas bishop has released another pastoral letter dealing with aspects of the Catholic Faith — this time touching on the issue of human suffering.
Bishop Joseph Strickland’s Oct. 17 missive drives home the idea that Catholics must take up their crosses and accept the “suffering that Our Lord offers to each of us individually in our daily lives.”
“The Expulsion of Adam and Eve From Paradise” (1791)
Artist: Benjamin West
He points specifically to “the mystery of redemptive suffering,” which he defines as “suffering that Our Lord allows us to experience and accept in this world and then offer back to Him in union with His suffering.” Redemptive suffering, he adds, is what “humbles us, purifies us, and draws us deeper into the joy of a life lived in Christ.”
The prelate is careful to rebut the idea that “we must enjoy or seek out suffering,” clarifying that “if we are united to Christ as we experience our daily sufferings, we can find the hope and joy that exist amidst the suffering.”
He also acknowledges that the problem of suffering is a “great mystery” accompanied by questions such as “Why does it have to be this way?” and “Why does God allow us to suffer if He loves us?”
The facile answer to these questions is “free will,” he says. “However, to be in an eternal, loving relationship with Him, we have to accept His love and then choose to love Him back because love is only possible if one has a choice to love or not to love.”
He traces the introduction of human suffering back to “our first parents, Adam and Eve, who chose to disobey God.” But the way out of that difficulty is to see that “God sent a New Adam — His Divine Son, Jesus — to redeem us from both the original sin committed by our first parents, as well as the personal sin we each commit in our own lives through our thoughts, words, deeds, and omissions.”
The perfect sacrifice of the New Adam is, indeed, the literal crux of the matter of redemptive suffering. Strickland teaches and shows us how to suffer and invites us to participate with Christ on the cross. Strickland teaches that accepting this invitation allows the faithful to find meaning in suffering. He adds that there is to be found “even a profound beauty in [such] suffering as it humbles us, purifies us, and conforms us to Christ in a way nothing else could.”
Strickland acknowledges it is difficult to recognize the good that comes from suffering when one is in the middle of it. But he asserts that “it is typically in those times of suffering when God is refining us the most.”
The bishop also directs readers to the current Catechism of the Catholic Church, which also teaches about redemptive suffering:
Christ not only allows Himself to be touched by the sick, but He makes their miseries His own … By His passion and death on the Cross, Christ has given a new meaning to suffering: It can henceforth configure us to Him and unite us with His redemptive Passion. (¶1505)
To help us journey through this vale of tears, the bishop gives the example of several saints who have suffered and come to the understanding — and even the embracing — of the mystery of redemptive suffering.
He quotes St. Paul telling the Colossians that Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross was perfect, but what is lacking from His perfect sacrifice is our participation in it: “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh, I am filling up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ on behalf of His body, which is the Church.” (Col 1:24)
He points to the apostolic letter of Pope St. John Paul II Salvifici Doloris, in which the saint contemplates how Our Blessed Mother exemplifies what it means to share in Christ’s suffering:
As a witness to her Son’s Passion by her presence, and as a sharer in it by her compassion, Mary offered a unique contribution to the gospel of suffering. … She truly has a special title to be able to claim that she “completes in her flesh” — as already in her heart — “what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions.”
He cites St. Gemma Galgani, the Italian mystic of the 19th century who died painfully of tuberculosis at age 25. Saint Gemma describes how Jesus once appeared to her and said,
Do you know, daughter, for what reason I send crosses to souls dear to Me? I desire to possess their souls, entirely, and for this I surround them with crosses, and I enclose them in sufferings and tribulation, that they may not escape from My hands; and for this I scatter thorns, that souls may fasten their affections upon no one, but find all content in Me alone. My daughter, if you do not feel the cross, it cannot be called a cross. Be sure that under the cross you will not be lost.
Strickland closes by reminding readers of all those who are suffering for their faith at this very moment “because of attacks by their own government, or from others who are hostile to Christ and His Church.” He says, “Our Lord walks especially close to these suffering souls.”
“Let us pray for them constantly,” he adds. “There are many, many saints who stand ready to assist them; let us pray for their intercession.”
He lastly mentions the “many who are suffering for their faith as they attempt to defend the Deposit of Faith due to attacks from within the Church” especially “in this time of the Synod on Synodality.”
But overall, he urges, “Let us say with St. Ignatius of Antioch: ‘Come fire and cross and grapplings with wild beasts … wrenching of bones, hacking of limbs, crushings of my whole body; come cruel tortures of the devil to assail me. Only be it mine to attain unto Jesus Christ.'”