Pain, Suffering, and Salvation: A Roman Catholic Reverie
By Joseph Andrew Settanni
Pain, suffering, and salvation are not normally linked together as things that would appear to be so naturally associated with each other. All are part of the tripartite axis of true Christ-centered devotion. Suffering quite normally includes pain, and it is nearly impossible to consider the idea of pain as being completely separate from suffering; but, as skeptics may ask, where does salvation come into the picture?
In what used to be taken to be a part of mainstream Christianity and still is accepted, in fact, as the dogmatic teaching of orthodox, traditionalist Roman Catholicism, salvation of one’s soul was and is held to be completely impossible without undergoing both pain and suffering during one’s life.
Every day, the morally and spiritually good Christian was/is typically expected to take up his cross and to endure pain and suffering in this life, so as to then merit the (true) life of the world to come. The pre-modern era, meaning before Renaissance-style, secular humanism and its cognate aesthetics and the rationalist-directed Enlightenment, had easily understood and comprehended the Christian message of no suffering, no salvation, though “sophisticated” intellects are degenerate enough to think otherwise.
The Message of Salvation
Today, in a Western world so broadly suffused with quite dominating modernist, post-Enlightenment, and postmodern notions, such a thought is readily scoffed at and ridiculed as superstitious nonsense and what used to be denounced as ignorant priestcraft. One of the beneficial results of a resurgent Islam is that it helps to rightly remind people that religion is not a private matter unfit for the public square; it should have public consequences and be the most central aspect of public life; anything less in terms of an understanding is the perpetuation of a lie; it bespeaks a lack of properly needed veracity.
But, the eternal Truth, rightly proclaimed by Catholicism, can be empirically demonstrated innumerable times; and, one “small” example can be given; while, e. g., some 80,000 had died in Hiroshima, Japan when the US atomic bomb exploded there, however, a group of eight Jesuit priests, who had lived in a presbytery just a mere eight blocks from that bomb’s ground zero, were completely unhurt; few would nonchalantly deny it (except for hard-core militant atheists) as having been, at a minimum, a tremendously incredible miracle, as much as is the miracle of ethereal redemption itself.
Most people, therefore, could not be utterly blind to the then revealed metaphysics of the metaphysical order of reality, when knowing about that mighty interesting historical fact. It was, in a special sense, but a slight hint about the proper and, thus, orthodox-Catholic understanding of true salvation in terms of the great power of God versus even the most powerful efforts of human beings to cause massive destruction, suffering, pain, and death. When required, however, Heaven can, in fact, conquer Hell on earth, much to the chagrin of militant atheists, of course.
It is not surprising, nonetheless, that that the heresy, for instance, of universal salvation has taken hold of millions of people who call themselves Christians and, also, numerous non-Christians who do not wish to be left out of the rush toward Paradise. Among Catholics, to cite an example, at usual Novus Ordo Masses [a sad creation of Vatican II] for the dead, the deceased person gets, in effect, axiomatically and, thus, automatically canonized as a saint in Heaven merely by dropping dead; presumably, the empirical presence of the corpse only is really enough proof of instant sanctity.
It is, nonetheless, conveniently and theologically forgotten that many are called but few are chosen. Also, many do not then feel any need to pray for the salvation of the souls in Purgatory, cutting off a means of charity, though even Protestants, of course, categorically deny the very existence of such a much needful place; the presumption, one guesses, may be that no good Protestants would care to visit such a place, lest they be contaminated by contact with errant Catholic spirits.
If someone gets told, however, according to the traditional doctrine of the Catholic Church, that it is highly unlikely that the vast majority of believers (as well as nonbelievers) are ever going to Heaven, this point of view gets strongly denounced and utterly rejected as if it were—what—a heresy. Many Catholics actually do think, e. g., that universal salvation was, somehow or other, joyously promulgated as a (new-fangled) doctrine at the Second Vatican Council, which it was not.
In fact, however, not even Vatican II had dared to declare the nonexistence of Purgatory, meaning that souls have to still endure truly enough pain and suffering there to fully compensate, for not enough pain/suffering on earth, during their mortal lives. Not enough prior penance might have been done before death in this world; millions upon millions will not automatically merit Heaven simply by dying or thinking that faith alone will get them into the place; Purgatory then becomes a logical necessity, as such Protestant converts as, e. g., Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801 – 1890) found out through study, prayer, and contemplation.
Newman sagaciously wrote, in his Parochial and Plain Sermons, that, “Who does not see that to bear pain well is to meet it courageously, not to shrink or waver, but to pray for God’s help, then to look at it steadfastly, to summon what nerve we have of mind and body, to receive its attack, and to bear up against it (while strength is given us) as against some visible enemy in close combat?” In his famous Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII wrote that, “The consequences of sin are bitter and hard to bear, and they must accompany man as long as life lasts. To suffer and to endure, therefore, is the lot of humanity; let them strive as they may, no strength and no artifice will ever succeed in banishing from human life the ills and troubles which beset it.”
Of course, no one here is arguing that people ought to become either sadists or masochists; pain and suffering are to be endured and, if necessary, embraced willingly, though never to be enjoyed nor inflicted for its own sake. The main purpose is, therefore, to help purify one’s soul, through the act of lovingly embracing one’s cross in imitation of Jesus Christ, who suffered for at least three hours upon such a structure, designed specifically to help maximize pain and suffering in terms of their intentional intensification. Not surprisingly, all good, meaning fully practicing, Roman Catholics are supposed to know that they are to both live and die by the Sign of the Cross.
God is Not Santa Claus
Today, with the thought that the Supreme Being is all-loving and all-knowing and all-caring to the maximum degree of what it is thought that the true God is supposed to be, the universal salvation “doctrine” is made to seem justified, logical, rational, reasonable, and so very acceptable. So, the Lord God Almighty, being absolutely forgiving of (almost?) anything that humans do, acts at the person’s death as a kind of comprehensively merciful and nonjudgmental Santa Claus character.
The analogy is simple and pathetic; it is pathetically simple and simpleminded as well. Just as Mommy and Daddy know that Johnny or Sally was not that really good prior to Christmas but get presents after all, thus, God (conveniently) forgives all and admits all into Heaven.
Most people, however, who would normally laugh at whatever they consider to be merely superstitious gobbledygook of the most extremely absurd or ridiculous kind do still affirm the notion of universal salvation, contrary to the many things, for instance, that Jesus Himself had openly said, in the New Testament, that most people are definitely going to Hell.
So, the instant canonization of, say, Grandma or Grandpa at a typical Novus Ordo Mass for the dead is a way of willingly participating in the terrible propagation of a manifestly heretical belief equivalent to a silly fairytale full of very childish nonsense. It is opportunely forgotten, of course, that God’s justice is absolutely equal to His mercy because that is, by definition, of the very nature of the Supreme Being, which theological reasoning was all covered by St. Thomas Aquinas many centuries ago.
At least one major part of the success of the heresy of universal salvation is to be attributed to the significant success of neo-Pelagianism, the secularization of the thinking of the heresiarch Pelagius who taught that the Doctrine of Original Sin was false; he held that people are naturally good, though sinful institutions can come to corrupt them. One sees here, of course, the origins of Rousseau’s ideological thinking, and the thrust of the grand heresy of Modernism adamantly and properly denounced by Pope St. Pius X.
Neo-Pelagianism is best seen through assumptions about or efforts at the attempted perfectibility of Man; the theocentric universe is, therefore, replaced by the anthropocentric one as the grand cosmic paradigm for modern man. It should not, thus, be that surprising, therefore, if everyone is thought to get a free pass into Paradise once Original Sin as a doctrine is either directly or covertly disposed of by much convenient tergiversation (aka lying). The desire of the moderns is, therefore, to have a “God” of convenience molded into whatever size, shape, or kind needed for projecting a self-worship unto a diminished Godhead.
Notions of pain or suffering are relegated as being things in tune with ancient or medieval beliefs, mere useless vestiges of a superstitious darker past, of terribly unenlightened eras. Salvation today is a much easier thing. The universality of an enlightened salvation grants a dispensation that pushes aside the need for achieving any true and profound penitence and the having made reparation for sins; the once supposed need for repentance and remorse has been, somehow or other waved, taken away since true universal salvation, by definition, naturally forgives all. The new conception of God will not be defeated by mere sin, which, in previous centuries, would have been considered a rather bizarre or at least odd way of thinking about the Supreme Being.
Of course, those who would tend to seek some sort of rigor for even this kind of neo-Pelagian doctrine would make strict allowances for people such as, e. g., Adolf Hitler in not making it to Heaven, though he may have to simply endure a supposedly endless Purgatory of some kind or other. The anti-rigorists, as “logical” objectors, would not wish to even think that he really made it to Hell; they would wish to depopulate the very notion of perdition in their fetishistic regard for propagating universal salvation as a kind of “Get Out of Jail Free” card seen in the game of Monopoly.
After all, either universal really means what it explicitly says or it is not that truly comprehensive and, thus, not what enlightened modernists should be prepared to then accept theologically as being universally true. One ought not to be surprised that, therefore, as past history easily demonstrates, every heresy seeks to become a new orthodoxy.
Hundreds of millions of people seek means of escape from this world through drug addiction, sexual promiscuity/pornography, or excessive material consumption to soften or dull the “pain” of their existence; there is, moreover, no actual concern whatsoever regarding the commission of mortal or venial sins, for which their souls would be made answerable. Decades ago, there was the infamous countercultural expression: “If it feels good do it.”
But, the once existing counterculture of the 1950s and 1960s has basically become today’s mainstream culture, which strongly embraces and really is itself the Culture of Death. This is not, therefore, a day and age when either the masses or the intellectuals desire to reject self-love and favor the embrace of humility. In the second decade of the 21st century, one, moreover, sees a supremely prominent example of contemporary hubris in the greatly solipsistic character of B. H. Obama.
In contrast, Robert H. Benson had properly noted, in his Christ in the Church, that, “The whole of nature exists on the principle of vicarious suffering; and to reject Christianity because of the doctrine of atonement is to reject nature itself on the same account.” Nonetheless, the horrendous rebellion against God continues, as it certainly had with the Arian Heresy, Albigensian Heresy, Protestant Revolt, French Revolution, Communist Revolution, Vatican II, the New Atheism, and much else.
For as G. K. Chesterton (1874 - 1936) had well put it, early in the 20th century, the modern thrust of the 20th century was to seek to replace the normal with the abnormal; one can, now, easily add that the 21st century aggressively seeks the full sanctification of all that had once been thought clearly abnormal (bestiality, homosexuality, sadism, etc.) and the public condemnation of whatever had been the objections to such behavior. The (agnostic libertarian sociologist) Albert Hoyt Hobbs (1911 – 1994), decades ago, came up with the very congenial term of “Orwell’s Reversal” to intriguingly describe how the liberal/progressive intellectuals would endeavor to redefine what formerly had been abnormal into then becoming the new norm.
Related to the discussion at hand, however, the pursuit of joy and happiness are supposed to suggest that pleasure and comfort are the true new norms; pain and suffering are then thought of today as being abnormal, which is not surprising. Psychology and psychiatry remove any sense of sinfulness by suggesting that mere maladjustment has occurred; once someone becomes adjusted, e. g., into accepting sodomy as being simply normal for his life, then no maladjustment exists. A new normal has been manufactured by self-will, as if in an Alice-in-Wonderland world; plain veracity itself is thrown to the four winds as a consequence.
Christianized Pain and Suffering
On the contrary, in terms of realism, it is so needful to realize that pain and suffering, by Christ’s death on the Cross, had been forever Christianized into being privileges in that Christians could hope to imitate their Savior by taking up their own crosses during their lives. Suffering and pain are, thus, the privileges granted by a loving God to sentient beings having immortal souls that can then, in the life of the world to come, participate still as beings in their holy and resurrected bodies in Heaven forever.
In the 3rd century, St. Cyprian, in his On Immortality, correctly stressed the important fact that for Christians “adversity does not call us away from the truth of virtue and faith, but strengthens us by its suffering.” In the following 4th century, St. Augustine, in De Agone Christiano, well said: “Bodily suffering makes wicked souls miserable, but borne with fortitude it purifies souls that are good.”
Admittedly, modernists and postmodernists, of course, cannot perceive the positive good involved in pain or suffering; they ridicule, in addition, the idea of a resurrection within their confidently expressed materialist, positivist, hedonist, pragmatist, or nihilist speculations. Neither, e. g., World War I nor World War II had managed to crush such demonic optimism, besides the existence of genocides.
The more previous in time 18th century Enlightenment also, it can be critically said, dreamed of a world free of religion and dedicated to perfectionism on earth by the potent force of Reason deified. The drudgery, superstition, ignorance, misery, and irrationality of all past ages, crippled as they were by theological beliefs, could be thrown away into the dustbin of history; the great march of Progress (a god-term if ever there was one) could not be stopped.
After all, Jeremy Bentham, a quite supreme modernist of the 19th century, publicly contended that life actually consisted of minimizing pain and maximizing pleasure in terms of his utilitarian perspective, which he reasoned to be the truth for all advanced (read: secularist) societies and cultures. (He even made up a scale with numbers denoting things as to their giving of pain or pleasure.)
The idea of the opposite notion was, thus, thought to be just entirely irrational, superstitious, and nonsensical. Max Weber (prior to World War I) confidently thought that applied routinization, bureaucratization, and rationalization would substantially conquer or at least mostly diminish almost all of humanity’s evils. Others, furthermore, had equally high hopes for industrialization, urbanization, and modernization in general as the true perceived alleviators of mankind’s burdensome institutional imperfections and problems, of the means toward a terrene salvation, a New Eden on earth, freed at last of religion and its various and sundry inanities.
For the pre-modernist Christian and today’s orthodox, traditionalist Catholics, however, there is to be no genuine salvation without accepting pain and suffering as being the normal reality of human life, of the human condition, that must be theologically accepted as part of living a true Christian life. And, this attitude had once been held true for all of what used to be called mainstream Christianity, though this is no longer, increasingly, true.
Again, it may need to be properly stressed that there is not the supposed requirement that all of pain and suffering should be welcomed indiscriminately, as if this were only the greatest or truest pleasure, meaning in a masochistic manner. Only as these things have redeeming qualities or are made to be part of how someone seeks redemption can pain and suffering, therefore, aid in the process of personal salvation. No one is, however, obligated to go out and actively seek martyrdom.
For instance, St. Thomas More (1478 – 1535), in his famous confrontation with Henry VIII, was forced to eventually stand his ground and was, under what should have been “normal” circumstances, illegally convicted of treason, though he had lost his head just the same; but, that was no part of any original intention on the part of More, said to be a man for all seasons.
Rather than accepting being an accomplice of immorality and faithlessness through the taking of an anti-Christian oath, he then ended up choosing the path that would, sooner or later, lead to martyrdom. This martyr thought, however, that the ancient and honorable Law of England should have (logically) protected him in his silence, however, the tyrant-king, taking a page from Machiavelli, had himself become the new Law of England.
Most people, these days, are not faced with beheadings, except in some Muslim countries. And, few, if any, are crucified, as was Jesus, for about three hours prior to death. The goal of modern man, in sharp contrast, is to take as many pain pills as is necessary to at least dull the sense of pain. Also, of course, a wide variety of illegal drugs are used to provide illicit or illegal pleasure to hundreds of millions of people.
Not many human beings, on average, have or will ever experience the profound depths of agony and torment equivalent to a real crucifixion. Of course, many tens of millions had been tortured and brutalized to death over many centuries, inclusive of Communist, Nazi and Fascist death camps and torture chambers in the 20th century and in many Muslim countries even today.
Thus, suffering, pain, and death are not, for many people, matters that can be simply separated neatly. However, the real question becomes why anyone should think about either the seeking out of or the non-avoidance of pain and suffering for the sake of adhering to Christian beliefs? But, more than all of that, why should anyone in his right mind be actually willing to endure tremendous torment and terrible agony all for the sake of Christ the Lord? Reasons can be given.
As Thomas a Kempis, in his 15th century work The Imitation of Christ, said, “He who knows how to suffer will enjoy much peace. Such a one is a conqueror of himself and lord of the world, a friend of Christ, and an heir of heaven.” Also, he added that: “Nothing, how little soever, that is suffered for God’s sake, can pass without merit in the sight of God.” St. John of the Cross remarked, in his Spiritual Sentences and Maxims, that “The purest suffering bears and carries in its train the purest understanding.”
“Desire earnestly,” wrote St. Teresa of Jesus in her Maxims,” always to suffer for God in every thing and on every occasion.” Thus, it is to be properly understood that without pain and suffering, there is no salvation from this world, just as it ought to be known that one of the greatest glories of this world is the Roman Catholic Faith.
The path toward salvation is, therefore, not normally reached by living a life of ease and comfort; the road to the Infernal Regions has been often described as easy, broad and wide; the way toward Heaven has been noted as being narrow and long (read: difficult). Sacrificing one’s ease and comfort for exalting the greater glory of God, the King of Kings, is another reason, besides the attempt to gain salvation, to eventually reach the final celestial Kingdom, for all those who truly did the Lord’s will faithfully, on earth, during their mortal lives.
There is no surprise that a hard life filled with great toil and trouble, desperation and adversity, has been forever one of the true signs that someone has probably tried to live a saintly life, though not in and of itself conclusive evidence for sainthood. As for Heaven, many are called, few are chosen, as is known. Pain, suffering, and salvation, based upon all that has been previously said, do logically seem to be connected ideas, therefore, in terms of the finding of the spirit of true Christianity.
When all is done for the love of Christ, when pain and suffering are accepted in the name of the Lord, then the path toward a life dedicated to holiness has been so properly revealed. Christians are, furthermore, supposed to willingly lead holy lives by which their entire being is to be dedicated to living a Christian life for the love of God, which is not always easy to do; and, that is an understatement. The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, of course, provide quite ample opportunities for damnation as to various realms of temptation. But, where is the hope and loyalty of the lover of Christ supposed to be?
Above and beyond all other loyalties, a Christian is to have primary allegiance to Christ and His Church, which to Catholics means the Roman Catholic Church; thus, no State, ideology, political party, private organization, etc. is to be held above God and the eternal honor of the Lord God Almighty. There is to be none of this rationalist, modernist, Western compartmentalization of life by which “religion” gets pushed out of the public square and is supposed to be something only done on Sundays and in the relative privacy of a church building. Therefore, a good Christian is to be a man for all seasons.
The lives of all believing/committed Christians are, thus, to be always directed toward the demands of Christianity without any reservations or qualifications detrimental whatsoever to the correct leading of a spiritually Christian life; it is a life dedicated toward maximizing holiness. In other words, as a sagacious French writer, Charles Peguy, wrote long ago, the only real tragedy in life is not to have died a saint. Both modernity and postmodernity (as popularly understood), however, seek only to define truth and worth in worldly terms of success and accomplishment, which all stands ever opposed to Catholicism, of course.
The choice offered is between affirmative Catholicism with its Culture of Life versus the forever negating Culture of Death; the demonic, continued, obvious barbarism of human sacrifice through abortion, euthanasia, and infanticide (aka partial-birth abortion) must be rejected and ended entirely. Practices reflective of the evil nihilism of artificial contraception, sterilization, and in-vitro fertilization (with the many embryos that get discarded, etc.) must be stopped completely.
These are all manifestly satanic means of unnaturally seeking to avoid the consequences of man’s God-given humanity, which includes the major and human reality of pain and suffering on this planet. The vast majority of such practices do help, therefore, to evilly lead toward the now continuing self-extermination of the human race, as is seen in the birth dearth increasing throughout the world, and then pointing toward a demographic nightmare, a Culture of Death, usually justified variously by existential, phenomenological, nihilistic, or Gestalt theoretical interpretations of “truth” and “reality.”
Equally, clearly decadent societies and cultures do breed, e. g., disproportionate numbers of hate-filled mass murderers seeking to become infamous because their lives had, to them, become meaningless, unless oriented toward wildly inflicted death and destruction. This often leads nominalist-inspired critics of God, such as was Albert Camus, to critically question why a supposedly kind and loving Supreme Being can horribly allow such terrible and evil things to happen; his strident atheism thought it was simply intolerable and inexplicable in human (read: atheistic) terms of (limited) understanding.
It is never questioned, of course, why imperfect (read: sinful) mortal creatures are unable to perceive any problems coming from fallen beings in a fallen world who, by definition, are able to abuse their free will; thus, the Creator, not the creatures, is oddly charged with being imperfect, which axiomatically negates the very definition of God. Many people, in effect, do wish to have only a Deity of convenience — or none at all.
As a result, suffering, pain, and death are then to be transmuted into severely noted imperfections “immorally” or, thus, wrongly allowed by the defective, corrupt, or imperfect Supreme Being. Man judges God and finds Him wanting, in either a Darwinian, Nietzschean, or, perhaps, Freudian manner, suitable to a thoroughly secularized society and culture, with its greatly diminished virtues and, by the way, prominently enfeebled sense of logic as well. Man’s humanity is not thought to be a problem in any truly significant sense, after put into the predetermined (secular-oriented) context, of course.
The Creator is so found fully capable, after all, of sin in the rather bizarre minds of many modernists and postmodernists of various kinds, though all such warped and highly convoluted “reasoning” is, forever, unquestioned by these absurd and arrogant critics of the Deity. But, this was why the Christ, the Man without Sin, came into this world to open up Heaven by lovingly offering the needed means of salvation accomplished by the Crucifixion, regardless of, though because of, the sorrowful and shameful human condition. Prior to that supreme Sacrifice, there was only helplessness at the gates of a closed Heaven, for few today are fully capable of profoundly comprehending the enormous magnitude of Original Sin.
Every Christian must, therefore, properly accept his own “crucifixion” for the love of God and His greater glory. The ultimate choice is, therefore, between eternal joy and happiness in Heaven versus mere Benthamite utility and its ephemeral value on earth.
Conclusion
Leading a true Christian life without ever or mostly enduring and offering up one’s suffering and pain would seem, therefore, to be a logical impossibility in terms of the proper understanding of Christianity that has been presented here for cogent examination. To validly be a Christian, a Catholic, means, by definition, to be a sufferer in Christ by which the believer is justified in seeking to be washed in the Blood of the Lamb of God, to lead a life dedicated to holiness.
It is a life, furthermore, necessarily filled with prayer and good works that together help to rightly define how and by what means a soul is to, thus, move closer and closer to the Supreme Being, in terms of the theological understanding and comprehension of divine Truth. And, any valid belief system, meaning a substantial and substantive theology, Catholicism, as a true faith must then incorporate facts about the reality of what is called the human condition. Few, if any, people lead entire lives simply filled with the absolute fullness of comfort and ease, with unbounded luxury and effortless abundance.
The vast majority must work, and many do work hard with or without fair compensation. Additionally, unhappiness, travail, sorrow, sadness, and grief have, moreover, filled the lives of many; this is even especially true regarding the often horrific ordeals gone through by saints and martyrs.
One yet sees that torment and agony, aggravation and misery, do then definitely possess salvific qualities, when put into the right context of desiring to live a more fully Christian life, defined by the important need to actually pursue holiness, saintliness, for the appropriate sake of attaining one’s future and hoped-for salvation. (In any event, the literally millions of pathetic morons actually expecting the Mayan calendar to really mark the end of the world had better go find something more lasting to believe in when things, in fact, simply won’t end in mid-December of 2012.)
So, as the ironic Chesterton might have said, resolve stalwartly to live one’s life painfully and with suffering galore if needful for having a joy unknown to the ignorant naysayers of this decrepit world.
Athanasius contra mundum!
