The Pope and Glyzelle: The Question for Which There Is No Answer
January 22, 2015
When 12-year old Glyzelle Palomar recently asked Pope Francis why God allows children to suffer, the Pope offered an admirable reply.
Palomar, who raised the question to the Pontiff whom she met at a youth rally in Manilla last week, voiced a cry that plagues so many. The question has been posed in different ways, and remarkably different answers have been offered through the centuries by clerics and professors, by philosophers and theologians, and by normal folks struggling with the meaning of suffering. Why would a powerful and loving God allow the suffering of so many, especially so many children?
This is a question that many religious adherents must come to terms with, especially those who posit belief in a divine being who exercises some form of providential care and control over the world. Since the Enlightenment, this question has most famously been understood in terms of questions posed by the 18th c. British skeptic David Hume, who is himself drawing on questions posed by ancients like Epicurus.
Hume’s question goes like this: Is God willing to prevent evil but unable to do so? Then he is not omnipotent. Is God able to prevent evil but unwilling to do so? Then he is malevolent (or at least less than perfectly good). If God is both willing and able to prevent evil, then why is there evil in the world?
It’s that last part of the question that the young lady in the Philippines is getting at. She has likely learned through religious instruction to believe that there is a God who is good, loving, and powerful, and she is struggling to reconcile those teachings with her experience of suffering on the streets of her city.
One lesson to learn from young Palomar is that it is an act of faith to ask such a difficult question. Contrary to the notion that if one truly believes one won’t pose such questions, this child stands in the tradition of those faithful who ask difficult questions, precisely because it is unfaithful to believe with a blind, unquestioning faith. Her faithfulness was affirmed by a religious leader, the Pope, who took her question seriously.
Pope Francis embraced Palomar and later commended her to the crowd. In both words and tears, she, the Pope said, had expressed “a question for which there is no answer.”
We learn at least two other lessons from this encounter, both woven into the response of Pope Francis. Implicit in the Pope’s reply is that it is unsatisfactory to answer the very real question about human suffering by denying the reality of the divine.
We wouldn’t, of course, expect the Pope to deny his God, but in the face of suffering this is an answer to which some will resort. It is a simple way to answer the question, to state that human suffering exists because no god does. I can see why people can come to this conclusion, but I can’t affirm that conclusion as the one that best explains the world in which we live. Too much goodness, too much life, too much love exists to be explained in purely naturalistic terms, and that’s what the denial of god entails. The denial of the divine as an answer to why human suffering exists is a simple one, but it is not a satisfactory one.
The Pope’s very presence posits faith in the divine, and his embrace signifies the good that exists in the world. His words, fittingly sparse, instruct us to avoid another error, perhaps one more insidious than the denial of the divine itself. That is, Pope Francis, while affirming both the reality of suffering and the love of God, doesn’t attempt to answer Palomar’s question by telling her simply that “God is in control” or that God is “working for the greater good.”
Such “greater good” arguments have become commonplace. They reply to questions about suffering by affirming that god is all powerful and all loving and that god is, in fact, in control and guiding everything to a good and perfect end, even if we can’t see it. The implication of this view, of course, is that each death by starvation, rape, and murder is somehow not only a piece of the grand and good design of bringing things to an ultimate divine conclusion, but that somehow god is ordering (or at least allowing) such events in order to accomplish these divine purposes.
If the denial of god as an answer to suffering says to little, then the “greater good” answer says far too much. I often wonder if the person who states such a view would look into the face of a starving child, or the parent whose child was just murdered, or the woman who has just survived being raped, and offer assurances based on the theological conviction that this horror is all part of the plan of god to bring about the “greater good.”
Better is the answer of Pope Francis, who admits both the difficulty and necessity of the question posed by that child, and who urges us all to love and care for one another and the world in such a way that we confront evil with good.
When himself faced with evil, Jesus didn’t offer a lecture or give advice to his disciples about how to defeat the arguments of those who opposed them. Instead, he met evil with good. He acted kindly, wisely, with a love that ultimately cost him his life. It is this “greater love” that holds answers for the question of evil.
So said the apostle Paul to Christians who face suffering in the world: “overcome evil with good.”
Pope Francis offers the same answer to a young girl, and to the world, today. From Glyzelle Palomar, we learn to ask difficult questions and we learn that we shouldn’t fear searching for the truth. From Pope Francis we learn to welcome difficult questions, and to avoid simplistic or inconsistent answers to them. And to love.
From those who suffer so much in the world around us, from our everyday experiences of pain however trifling, we learn to see, to listen, and to meet evil with earnest expressions of good. However much we want to argue about what may or may not be in God’s power, this, at least, is within ours.
Palomar, who raised the question to the Pontiff whom she met at a youth rally in Manilla last week, voiced a cry that plagues so many. The question has been posed in different ways, and remarkably different answers have been offered through the centuries by clerics and professors, by philosophers and theologians, and by normal folks struggling with the meaning of suffering. Why would a powerful and loving God allow the suffering of so many, especially so many children?
This is a question that many religious adherents must come to terms with, especially those who posit belief in a divine being who exercises some form of providential care and control over the world. Since the Enlightenment, this question has most famously been understood in terms of questions posed by the 18th c. British skeptic David Hume, who is himself drawing on questions posed by ancients like Epicurus.
Hume’s question goes like this: Is God willing to prevent evil but unable to do so? Then he is not omnipotent. Is God able to prevent evil but unwilling to do so? Then he is malevolent (or at least less than perfectly good). If God is both willing and able to prevent evil, then why is there evil in the world?
It’s that last part of the question that the young lady in the Philippines is getting at. She has likely learned through religious instruction to believe that there is a God who is good, loving, and powerful, and she is struggling to reconcile those teachings with her experience of suffering on the streets of her city.
One lesson to learn from young Palomar is that it is an act of faith to ask such a difficult question. Contrary to the notion that if one truly believes one won’t pose such questions, this child stands in the tradition of those faithful who ask difficult questions, precisely because it is unfaithful to believe with a blind, unquestioning faith. Her faithfulness was affirmed by a religious leader, the Pope, who took her question seriously.
Pope Francis embraced Palomar and later commended her to the crowd. In both words and tears, she, the Pope said, had expressed “a question for which there is no answer.”
We learn at least two other lessons from this encounter, both woven into the response of Pope Francis. Implicit in the Pope’s reply is that it is unsatisfactory to answer the very real question about human suffering by denying the reality of the divine.
We wouldn’t, of course, expect the Pope to deny his God, but in the face of suffering this is an answer to which some will resort. It is a simple way to answer the question, to state that human suffering exists because no god does. I can see why people can come to this conclusion, but I can’t affirm that conclusion as the one that best explains the world in which we live. Too much goodness, too much life, too much love exists to be explained in purely naturalistic terms, and that’s what the denial of god entails. The denial of the divine as an answer to why human suffering exists is a simple one, but it is not a satisfactory one.
The Pope’s very presence posits faith in the divine, and his embrace signifies the good that exists in the world. His words, fittingly sparse, instruct us to avoid another error, perhaps one more insidious than the denial of the divine itself. That is, Pope Francis, while affirming both the reality of suffering and the love of God, doesn’t attempt to answer Palomar’s question by telling her simply that “God is in control” or that God is “working for the greater good.”
Such “greater good” arguments have become commonplace. They reply to questions about suffering by affirming that god is all powerful and all loving and that god is, in fact, in control and guiding everything to a good and perfect end, even if we can’t see it. The implication of this view, of course, is that each death by starvation, rape, and murder is somehow not only a piece of the grand and good design of bringing things to an ultimate divine conclusion, but that somehow god is ordering (or at least allowing) such events in order to accomplish these divine purposes.
If the denial of god as an answer to suffering says to little, then the “greater good” answer says far too much. I often wonder if the person who states such a view would look into the face of a starving child, or the parent whose child was just murdered, or the woman who has just survived being raped, and offer assurances based on the theological conviction that this horror is all part of the plan of god to bring about the “greater good.”
Better is the answer of Pope Francis, who admits both the difficulty and necessity of the question posed by that child, and who urges us all to love and care for one another and the world in such a way that we confront evil with good.
When himself faced with evil, Jesus didn’t offer a lecture or give advice to his disciples about how to defeat the arguments of those who opposed them. Instead, he met evil with good. He acted kindly, wisely, with a love that ultimately cost him his life. It is this “greater love” that holds answers for the question of evil.
So said the apostle Paul to Christians who face suffering in the world: “overcome evil with good.”
Pope Francis offers the same answer to a young girl, and to the world, today. From Glyzelle Palomar, we learn to ask difficult questions and we learn that we shouldn’t fear searching for the truth. From Pope Francis we learn to welcome difficult questions, and to avoid simplistic or inconsistent answers to them. And to love.
From those who suffer so much in the world around us, from our everyday experiences of pain however trifling, we learn to see, to listen, and to meet evil with earnest expressions of good. However much we want to argue about what may or may not be in God’s power, this, at least, is within ours.