By Aaron Kheriaty, MD, Catholic Exchange, March 14, 2025
Aaron Kheriaty, MD, is a practicing psychiatrist and Director of the Bioethics and American Democracy Program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Dr. Kheriaty graduated from the University of Notre Dame in philosophy and pre-medical sciences, and earned his MD degree from Georgetown University. He is the author of several books and articles for professional and lay audiences, and he lectures regularly on topics related to psychiatry, social science, bioethics, and spirituality.
Author’s Note: This is Part 2 in a weekly Lenten series on the Christian meaning of suffering and the Cross of Christ.
In the first part of this series I introduced the brief prayer, doce me passionem Tuam—teach me Your suffering—a simple aspiration to our Lord that we can repeat many times a day. I explained how this prayer turns our gaze away from our own sufferings and towards the suffering of Christ, which, paradoxically, can liberate us from our own anguish.
The Christian Faith offers the only fully compelling answer to the problem of evil—the age-old question of why an all-powerful, all-good, all-knowing God would permit so much human pain. For a Christian, the fact that we cannot escape suffering is not necessarily a tragedy. For in our suffering we can find the Cross, and in the Cross we find the full manifestation of God’s love for us. We Catholics have read the Gospels, but perhaps we do not yet really know Christ’s Passion. We must learn it anew, and He must teach us. Lent is the perfect time for us to do this.
We tend to flee suffering, to avoid the Cross at all costs. But at the center of the Christian claim is God who became man in Jesus Christ, and as a man suffered all that could be suffered—for you and for me, for each of us alone and individually. And He did not teach us to seek a life of comfort and ease, but to deny ourselves, take up our cross daily, and follow Him (Lk. 9:23). ….
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