SOFFERENZA. – A philosophico-moral problem, psychologically difficult, is posed by the fact that suffering accompanies everyone’s life. Christian Revelation has given the “problem of pain” the only answer that calms the spirit and sublimates it even amid the most bitter suffering. God does not delight in the death and pains of human beings (Sap. 1,13); indeed, in a plan of providence frustrated by sin, he had established that man should pass from earthly life to heavenly life without undergoing dissolution. But through sin death entered the world, with all its painful consequences (Rom. 5, 17). The pains that afflict humanity are physical (bodily distresses, from indigence, poverty, hunger, and thirst, to the most atrocious illnesses and finally death) and moral (temptations, aridity, anxieties, misunderstandings, adversities, even hatred and persecutions). They occur in every variety of form and degree. And besides individual pains, there are collective and social ones, such as wars, famines, and other public calamities.
Suffering is a natural consequence of human limitations, subject to the disintegrating action of the environment and to the attacks of the freedoms of others, nor does it in itself possess supernatural value. Yet for man it is a warning, a stimulus, and a moral tonic, as the moralists of classical antiquity, especially the Stoics, already demonstrated (cf. Cicero, Tusculanae disputationes, II. I-III). For souls enlivened by sanctifying Grace, every suffering acquires both a meritorious and impetratory value, drawing down divine favors upon them, and a satisfactory and propitiatory value, by which they expiate their sins and ward off from themselves and their loved ones many deserved punishments. In the moral life, suffering is a safeguard against many sins, fostering detachment from creatures, and a light that enables one to see the various values of life more clearly. Generally speaking, other conditions being equal, pain borne with love and resignation increases the merit of actions and unites one more intimately to God, making the sufferer more like the Divine Savior, who chose, through pain and the cross, to redeem the human race from guilt.
Catholic tradition has always recognized these values of suffering. St. Augustine already observed that “from every side God calls men by the scourge of tribulation” (Enarr. in Ps., 102, 8), and noted that pain has different value according to the manner in which it is endured: “Non qualia, sed qualis quisque patiatur” (De Civit. Dei, I, 8). St. Francesco di Sales affirmed that “Our Lord often does us greater good through trials and afflictions than through happiness and consolations” (Letter 814). Indeed, through the trial of suffering virtue is affirmed and refined (I Pt. 1, 7), acquiring solidity like an earthen vessel in the fire (St. Augustine, in Ps., 75, V. 16). Therefore St. Paul already congratulated the Philippians that God had granted them the grace “not only to believe in Christ, but also to suffer for him” (Phil. 1, 29).
All the saints therefore loved and exalted suffering. Ignatius of Loyola called “illness a gift no less than health” (Costit. d. C. d. G., part 3, chap. 1, no. 17), and St. Giovanna di Chantal sincerely declared: “For my part, I would consider it a great grace if not even a single day of my life were without pain; indeed, not even an hour, in order to do penance for the many sins I commit each day” (Lettera 310). In the De imitatione Christi, Christian doctrine on suffering is epitomized in the chapter De regia via sanctae crucis (II, 12).