(Catholics Only) Discussion on St. Pope John Paul II "On Human Suffering"

I started a new thread for the discussion itself

Discussion Week 1 (Sunday May 20-Sat may 26)
Section 1 (introduction)
Section 2 (The World of Human Suffering)

Discussion Week 2 (Sunday May 27-June 2)
Section 3 (The Quest For An Answer To The Question of The Meaning of Suffering)

Discussion Week 3 (Sunday June 3- Saturday June 9)
Section 4 (Jesus Christ Suffering Conquered By Love)

Discussion Week 4 (Sunday June 10-Saturday June 16)
Section 5 (Sharers In The Suffering of Christ)

Discussion Week 5 (Sunday June 17-Saturday June 23)
Section 6 (The Gospel of Suffering)

Discussion Week 6 (Sunday June 24- Saturday June 30)
Section 7 (The Good Samaritan)

Discussion Week 7 (Sunday July 1- Saturday July 7)
Section 8 (Conclusion)

Discussion Week 1 (Sunday May 20-Sat may 26)
Section 1 (introduction)
Section 2 (The World of Human Suffering)

I made the above post in case we want to edit the original to provide in conversation links to each section.

People can start the conversation if they want. I will add some content later, I have to get a late lunch ready for the kids.

One thing that is very interesting is that the Pope starts the letter with this:

1. Declaring the power of salvific suffering, the Apostle Paul says: "In my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the Church"(1).

I remember watching a Catholic author who was a former non-Catholic minister on EWTN. He had just written a book and the interviewer asked, "When you were not Catholic how did you preach a sermon on that Scripture...it is a very Catholic thought."

And his reply was, "I could never preach on it."

So the Pope starts with this very Catholic piece of Scripture. He does not start the letter with some philosophy about suffering or some watering down of the idea. He starts fully with the joining of our suffering to Christs. And with a verse that calls us to see our own suffering as a cooperation, by God's will, with Christ. Not that God wills evil, but rather that God calls us, in faith, to accept the joining to Christ. It is an almost Eucharistic line of Scripture. It does not shy away from the fact that suffering is not to be avoided and even can not, for the Christian, be avoided.

And he follows it with affirmation of that:

If we seek to be one with Christ, we must suffer with Him. It calls to mind the line of Thomas in the Gospel (John 11:16):

So Thomas called Didymus said to his fellow disciples, “Let us also go to die with him.”

This has always been powerful:


We are commanded not to fear. But we fear suffering so much. And we seek to understand so we can fear less but it links us to a mystery we can not ever fully grasp. So we strive to reconcile our hearts and understand what little we can.

The nuns used to tell us it was called offering our suffering up.

I tell my students that whenever you suffer and you think to yourself no one can know when I'm suffering, Christ does. Not just because He is God... But because, on the cross He suffered everything every human being will ever suffer; large and small. And that suffering transcends time so He is actually suffering everything you are suffering with you. Always.

Christ does not suffer as He did on the cross, that is once and done, represented in an infinitely contained moment in the Eucharist. But, He Sacred Heart is full of compassion, mercy and suffering at the evil in the world that we do to ourselves and each other. So in that way the wounds on even His glorified body speak of the necessity for suffering even though He has conquered it. It is one of the greatest mysteries that although redemption happened, suffering continues. And the purpose of it, as St. Pope John Paul II points out, is tied to redemption.

From Section 8 in part II.

In itself human suffering constitutes as it were a specific "world" which exists together with man, which appears in him and passes, and sometimes does not pass, but which consolidates itself and becomes deeply rooted in him. This world of suffering, divided into many, very many subjects, exists as it were "in dispersion". Every individual, through personal suffering, constitutes not only a small part of that a world", but at the same time" that world" is present in him as a finite and unrepeatable entity. Parallel with this, however, is the interhuman and social dimension. The world of suffering possesses as it were its own solidarity. People who suffer become similar to one another through the analogy of their situation, the trial of their destiny, or through their need for understanding and care, and perhaps above all through the persistent question of the meaning of suffering. Thus, although the world of suffering exists "in dispersion", at the same time it contains within itself a. singular challenge to communion and solidarity. We shall also try to follow this appeal in the present reflection.

Considering the world of suffering in its personal and at the same time collective meaning, one cannot fail to notice the fact that this world, at some periods of time and in some eras of human existence, as it were becomes particularly concentrated. This happens, for example, in cases of natural disasters, epidemica, catastrophes, upheavals and various social scourges: one thinks, for example, of a bad harvest and connected with it - or with various other causes - the scourge of famine.

One thinks, finally, of war. I speak of this in a particular way. I speak of the last two World Wars, the second of which brought with it a much greater harvest of death and a much heavier burden of human sufferings. The second half of our century, in its turn, brings with it—as though in proportion to the mistakes and transgressions of our contemporary civilization—such a horrible threat of nuclear war that we cannot think of this period except in terms of an incomparable accumulation of sufferings, even to the possible self-destruction of humanity. In this way, that world of suffering which in brief has its subject in each human being, seems in our age to be transformed—perhaps more than at any other moment—into a special "world": the world which as never before has been transformed by progress through man's work and, at the same time, is as never before in danger because of man's mistakes and offences.

That suffering is personal and collective is an interesting point. And with the end of part II, St. Pope John Paul II is moving into the quest for an answer to suffering.