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Pain in the Christian Life

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 July 2024

John Mahoney S.J.
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Christians are accused of discounting human suffering. Catholics are charged with increasing people’s sufferings in order to keep the rules of the Church, sometimes with regarding suffering as a just punishment, and even with considering it as something good and desirable in itself. In addition, your profession and mine are closely and continually connected with suffering in a variety of forms, and while on occasion we may be forgiven for seeing life in terms of little else, the possibility of this one-sided view at least prevents us from evading the fact that there is a great deal of suffering in ordinary life and that as both Christians and professionals we are compelled to think seriously of it.

Suppose we begin with this idea of suffering as a punishment, or a judgment, or a visitation of divine wrath. It is not uncommon to meet people who regard their sufferings as a judgment, and who gloomily go further and say that not only is God punishing them, but he is quite right to do so.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 52 , Issue 615 , August 1971 , pp. 357 - 363
Copyright
Copyright © 1971 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

page 357 note 1 A paper read to the Guild of Catholic Professional Social Workers at their recent Spode Conference on The Problem of Pain.

page 358 note 1 Closing Message of the Council to the Poor, the Sick, and the Suffering, Documents of Vatican II, ed. Abbott, 1966, p. 734.

page 358 note 2 Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, No. 41 (Abbott, p. 70).

page 361 note 1 Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, No. 43 (Abbott, p. 245).

page 361 note 2 ‘“Grieving the Spirit”—On Sin’, in R. Butterworth (ed.), The Spirit in Action, St Paul Publications, 1968, p. 66.

page 361 note 3 John Hick, Evil and the God of Love, Fontana, 1968, p. 343.

page 362 note 1 Paul Tillich, The Eternal Now, SCM, 1963, pp. 11f.

page 363 note 1 In Helen Waddell’s sensitive translation, Mediaeval Latin Lyrics, Penguin, p. 179.