inside america

While the World Turns
Why does God allow bad things to happen to people? The question touches a Mystery that exceeds our capacity to understand it,  yet we find great clarity in the insistenceof the Cross, with us at the center of salvation.

by lorenzo albacete

Recent times have been marked by devastating tornados and other natural disasters that have stunned the American people. Amidst the issues discussed and questions raised in the news media’s coverage of all this horror, the ultimate question was bound to arise in its many forms. Why?
This is how Pope John Paul II put it in the first book ever published by a Pope, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, published (1994):
This question “is the source of recurring doubt not only in regard to the goodness of God but also in regard to His very existence. How could God have permitted so many wars, concentration camps, the Holocaust? Is the God who allows all of this still truly Love, as Saint John proclaims in his First Letter? Indeed, is He just with respect to His creatures? Doesn’t He place too many burdens on the shoulders of individuals? Doesn’t He leave man alone with these burdens, condemning him to a life without hope? So many  incurably ill people in hospitals, so many handicapped children, so many human lives completely denied ordinary happiness on this earth, the happiness that comes from love, marriage, and family.”
It seems a list that could go on forever.

All of these questions were asked in recent weeks, even by representatives of the secular media. These, of course, had no answers, but who can blame them?
Public officials dealt with the question by referring to the new formula about their “thoughts and prayers” to be elevated to an unidentified god. Some of the suffering victims continued to affirm their faith in God, even in Jesus Christ. And, in a way, it was moving when they did so before the sympathetic and in some cases patronizing gaze of the anchors and reporters. The suffering proclaimed their faith, but it seemed to require the silencing of a critical mind. The Protestant split between faith and reason was so clear to me, and so painful.
Here then is the John Paul II’s treatment of the question. Of course, it is not an answer, because the question touches a Mystery that exceeds our capacity to understand it, as Job learned. Still, this line of thought may be useful: “Stat crux dum volvitur orbis (The Cross remains constant while the world turns).”

That is, the drama of the defeat of Satan (of evil in this world enthroned in fallen nature) becomes present as time moves on toward eternity. John Paul II writes that “we find ourselves at the center of the history of salvation.”
In us, the freedom of the spirit and the processes of nature are inexorably bound. In fact, in creating this kind of “free” creature, the evil resulting from our free initiatives disturbs nature, and the evil caused by natural processes reaches our inner life. Indeed, God has put Himself under the judgment of man and the history of salvation currently taking place in our world is in fact the history of our continual judgment of God.
“Could God have justified Himself before human history, so full of suffering, without placing the Cross of Christ at the center of human history?”
“Love desires to justify Himself to mankind,” explains the Pope. “He is not theAbsolute that remains outside of the world, indifferent to human suffering.” He shares the destiny of man fully. The divine omnipotence, the omnipotence of His love is shown when He descends into hell and brings to it an anticipation of His Easter victory. He is the measure with which we must judge the suffering of the world.