The Real Answer to Why God Allows Suffering

The Fr. Mike Schmitz Catholic Podcast

Ascension

Christianity, Religion & Spirituality, Society & Culture

4.9 • 7.1K Ratings

🗓️ 10 September 2020

⏱️ 8 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Playing a video game called Injustice helps Fr. Mike explain the real answer to why God allows suffering.

In Injustice, Superman becomes a totalitarian dictator in his attempt to try and eliminate evil. Batman tries to tell him, in trying to eliminate evil he has ceased to do good, because without the freedom to choose evil, we don’t really have the freedom to choose good either.

Couldn’t God do better than Superman though? Couldn’t he just fix everything by bringing us back to the Garden of Eden? Anyone who is a parent knows that doesn’t work because God’s children—us—would just mess up again.

So what does God actually do? He doesn’t eliminate evil. He draws close to us in the midst of evil. He suffers a painful death. He descends to the depths of hell. He doesn’t take away suffering. He transforms it and redeems it by entering into it. This led St. Paul to say:

“Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church” (Colossians 1:24).

St. John Paul II said in suffering we receive a sliver of the Cross. Our suffering matters because Christ’s suffering matters and we are his body. All we have to do is tell God to use our suffering. Nothing given to God is ever wasted, so give it to God.

Support The Fr. Mike Schmitz Catholic Podcast

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Have an infidel mic, and this is Ascension Presents.
0:02.0	This is a heavy topic.
0:03.7	I've touched on it before, but I want to touch on it again.
0:06.8	It's the question of looking around this world,
0:09.3	there's so much suffering.
0:11.1	There's so much evil in the world.
0:12.8	There's physical evil, people getting sick and dying.
0:16.0	There's moral evil, people doing evil things.
0:18.4	If God was good, why wouldn't He take it away?
0:21.6	Why wouldn't God do something and make it so that bad things don't happen?
0:30.0	I want to look at it through this particular lens.
0:37.3	I've talked about this before, nobody will link to another video about this,
0:41.0	but looking at it from a different lens or this particular lens,
0:43.5	the lens of comic books.
0:45.8	You might be familiar with the Injustice series in DC Comics.
0:49.7	So the Injustice series in DC Comics is also made into a video game.
0:53.1	I played my first Xbox two weeks ago.
0:55.5	My nephew had his confirmation, and his little brother said,
0:58.0	hey, I'm coming. I want to play Injustice with me.
1:00.7	I'm like, he's the comic book fan,
1:02.1	and I'm finally related to a comic book fan.
1:03.8	It's so good.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Ascension, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Ascension and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.