This morning our Dominican professor of a specialized course of epistemology greeted us saying, "Happy Holy Week!" Not that he got confused about the calendar, but because Thursday is the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas, the 50th anniversary of the Angelicum being raised to the status of pontifical university, and a big feast day for our school. Our classes were cancelled for the day, and some of us thought the holy father went through great lengths--really more than he needed have!--to refuse our invitation to come to us that day. A simple "no thanks" would have sufficed!
Quote, from Vann's The Pain of Christ:
Why does God allow the evil and the suffering [sin] produces? First, because he is Love: and Love does not rule by violence: the power of free-will is given, and it means the power to return hatred for love if we so choose. But secondly, you remember how the Church on Holy Saturday speaks of the primal sin as felix culpa, a blessed fault, because through it humanity has something of ineffable value which it could not have had otherwise. Had there been no sin we should not have known that immense revelation of the depths of love which is the Cross; and, for our part, we should not have known the human response to it, we should not have been capable of that depth of love and understanding which only sorrow can bring to us. The divine truth is made clear to us in its human analogy; for human beings find, in their love of one another, that the deepest glory is that which comes of pain. Suffering, then, has a creative, a redemptive, role: wherever there is suffering in the world, there is the sorrow of God; and to share in the human suffering and the divine sorrow is to find the way to life in its fullness not only for oneself but in the end for the world.
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