Day 44: The Scandal of Evil

Angels and men, as intelligent and free creatures, have to journey toward their ultimate destinies by their free choice and preferential love. They can therefore go astray. Indeed, they have sinned. Thus has moral evil, incommensurably more harmful than physical evil, entered the world. God is in no way, directly or indirectly, the cause of moral evil. He permits it, however, because he respects the freedom of his creatures and, mysteriously, knows how to derive good from it. CCC 311

In today's reading, the Catechism covers one of the most difficult topics that mankind has struggled with probably since just after the Fall: the existence of evil and why God allows it. This section is rightly titled in part, "The Scandal of Evil" because to us with our finite minds, it is scandalous. I have no insights better than the best that great minds have offered down through the centuries. On this, I'm forced to plead my inability to adequately explain it fully, and really no one I've read ever has. I'm left with Job's response to the Lord after he had demanded an answer from the Ineffable God to his suffering: "I have spoken but did not understand; things too marvelous for me, which I did not know" (Job 42:3). 

In this powerful scene from the 2008 movie God On Trial, Jewish concentration camp victims during the Holocaust render a verdict of "guilty" on Him in their anguish:

While this scene is fictional, man has cried out in anger and grief to God many times throughout our history when stricken by such horrendous evil. Yet God gave us free will, the ability to choose goodness or to do evil. As the Catechism Companion, Vol I comments on this:

God's answer to evil is himself, in the person of his Son, Jesus. He freely allows evil to overwhelm him so that he can conquer and transform it. He doesn't remove evil from the earth, but he redeems it... God is the Lord of all the events of history. But we do not always know the details of the divine plan (see CCC 314). (p. 92)

In a sense, evil can give us the ultimate form of trust in God: do we say yes to Him and accept that we will never fully understand things in this life, or not? He understands our anger and grief but calls us to do more and turn to Him despite this. Just like Job did.

Finally, Fr. Mike Schmitz has a pretty good video on this subject:

Saint Michael Vanquishing Satan