Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People?
Rabbi Harold Kushner’s three-year-old son was diagnosed with a degenerative disease and was told that he would only live until his early teens. Years after his son’s death, Rabbi Kushner wrote a book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. He posed the question, “Can God be all good and all powerful?” After struggling with this question for many years he concluded, no. God was either all good or He was all powerful, but He could not be both.
He based this on the premise that God had to be all good. He could not believe otherwise. If that was true, then how could God allow his young son to die. It just did not make sense. Therefore, He was not all powerful.
Peter Kreeft, in his book Making Sense Out of Suffering, dealt with Rabbi Kushner’s conclusion that God was not all powerful. Kreeft, a convert to the Catholic faith, believes, as the Catholic Church teaches, God is all good and all powerful.
1) God is omniscient, 2) God is omnipotent, 3) God is good, and 4) There is evil.
God allows evil to exist. Why is a mystery. There are evils that are caused by acts people take. Murder, for example, is evil.
There are other evils that arise through nature. Disease is a natural evil.
Redemptive Suffering
The issue of Rabbi Kushner’s son suffering from a disease that was out of his control can fall under the virtue of bearing wrongs patiently. This can be referred to as Redemptive Suffering.
The culture we live in today has many people doing anything and everything not to be uncomfortable, let alone to actually suffer. God can use our suffering to help purify our soul. We can also suffer for others to help them. How and why this works is another one of the many mysteries for which we do not have a definite answer.
However, we may not understand it completely, but we have the perfect example of it happening with Jesus dying on the cross for our sins.
My Mother’s Death
My mother died from the effects of Alzheimer’s. She was diagnosed with the disease around 2002 or 2003. She was living in an assisted living facility. She was never a large woman, but she was strong. She had been in a facility beginning in 2008 when my father was dying.
In late 2009 she was not eating very much. She said she wasn’t hungry. My sister and I, my father had died, met with her doctor to find out about having a feeding tube inserted to assist with feeding her.
We needed to determine if my mother’s body was still able to digest food and absorb the nutrients. Alzheimer’s attacks the brain. As it progresses, it causes the brain to shut down bodily functions until the person dies. If her body could no longer process food, there was no point in having a tube inserted.
The doctor told us her body could still process food and the procedure was a simple one. He also said she was healthy enough that the surgery would not pose an exceptional risk. He added, though, it would be better to do it sooner rather than later.
We decided to have the tube inserted.
The surgery was to be performed at a Catholic hospital. Before the surgery could take place, my sister and I had to meet with the hospital’s ethics team.
The team was comprised of about ten people, Catholic and non-Catholic. None of the members was a priest or deacon.
Most people did not speak. I spoke for my sister and myself. A woman who was very strongly against the surgery asked me if I would want to live like my mother was living? I told her, “No. No one would want to live like that. However, my mother, when we were little, would always tell us when we cried after hurting ourselves to ‘offer up our hurts.’ She understood redemptive suffering.”
The surgery was performed in December 2009. My mother died February 3, 2010.
Did the surgery help her? I don’t know. Did it hurt her? I don’t think so. Did I make the right decision? Yes.
Some time after my mom died, I found this in one of her last entries in her 2005 diary, her last diary:
September 20, 2005:
Woke to a terrible revelation that I have been fearing for a long time and I wouldn’t or could not face.
Bill [my father] woke me to ask if I wanted to go to Mass. I am so grateful that we went as I feel that God has helped me today to accept whatever my fate is or what is ahead but face each day as well as I can.
She understood Redemptive Suffering.
Addendum
While reading Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical, SPE Salvi, I came across this:
40. I would like to add here another brief comment with some relevance for everyday living. There used to be a form of devotion—perhaps less practiced today but quite widespread not long ago—that included the idea of “offering up” the minor daily hardships that continually strike at us like irritating “jabs”, thereby giving them a meaning. Of course, there were some exaggerations and perhaps unhealthy applications of this devotion, but we need to ask ourselves whether there may not after all have been something essential and helpful contained within it. What does it mean to offer something up? Those who did so were convinced that they could insert these little annoyances into Christ’s great “com-passion” so that they somehow became part of the treasury of compassion so greatly needed by the human race. In this way, even the small inconveniences of daily life could acquire meaning and contribute to the economy of good and of human love. Maybe we should consider whether it might be judicious to revive this practice ourselves.
I think my mother would have agreed with Pope Benedict on this.
Greg Gillen
July 14, 2023 (My parents 80th wedding anniversary)
Edited May 11, 2024
Edited August 26, 2024
© 2025 Greg Gillen
Image Credit/Divine Mercy/Public Domain/Merged with quote by St. Faustina/Greg Gillen
