BASIC EVANGELIZATION TRAINING IS COMING IN APRIL!

Send questions to: DRE@saintcolumbachurch.org and place “Q’s Pews” in the subject line. All questions are answered and kept confidential. If your question is used in the column, it will remain anonymous. James Gregory, DRE

“Fide quaerens Intellectum”

“Always be prepared to make a defense … for the hope that is in you … with gentleness and reverence” (1 Peter 3:15)

“Q’s from the Pews”

Holy Suffering is Not stoicism.

The story of Job gives us our clearest Scriptural understanding of suffering, which comes to its zenith in the human suffering of Jesus.  In neither case do we witness blind acceptance of suffering.  Suffering is not something God placed in the world.  Suffering is primarily a result of our fall.  When suffering is looked at as a punishment, then one of two things happens.  We look at God as a god of vengeance, or we see God as causing suffering to make us stronger – a kind of coaching by fire.  Job’s friend’s Eliphaz affirmed this kind of suffering. “Happy is the man whom God reproves.” (Job 5:17) Eliphaz explains this by extoling God’s ability to forgive. Yet his premise, that God punishes to make us stronger, is not consistent with God as love. Love seeks the good of the beloved.  If suffering were caused by God, then stoicism (endurance without complaint) or repentance in the face of suffering would be the only possible responses to suffering. Job recognizes that if God punished us for all of our sins with suffering, then we could not bear it. Though suffering can be due to our own personal failings, our sins, it is not always so. Sometimes we suffer because of the sins of others. Job suffered because of Satan. It is in this way that Job’s trials foreshadow the Passion of Christ “who became sin, though he himself did not know sin.” (2Cor 5:21) Job persisted in his faith and love of God through suffering not of his own making, because he trusted God’s Love of him. “Love is the source of the answer to the meaning of suffering given by God to man in the Cross of Christ.” (JPII SD 13) When we join our non-self-created suffering to the Cross we become obedient to God’s Providence. Receiving the Eucharist, we join our suffering to Christ’s and no longer suffer alone. The Path to Holiness is through the Cross.

“Catholic Challenge for May:

Turn frustrations and disappointments into a path to holiness. Pray for understanding and receive the Eucharist more frequently.

“Inside Catholic Baseball”

There are only seven biblical passages that the Catholic Church interprets in one definitive way: Jn 3:5, Jn 20:22, Jn 20:23, Lk 22:19, 1Cor 11:24, Rm 5:12, and James 5:14.

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