REFLECTIONS · SEPTEMBER 2026
If God is love, why is there so much suffering?
By Chris Cardillo
I believe God is only love.
That's an easy sentence to write.
It's much harder to believe when you look at the world.
Children get sick. Good people suffer. Families lose people they love. Wars happen. People hurt each other for reasons that are sometimes difficult to comprehend. Terrible things happen to people who seem to have done nothing to deserve them.
If God is love, why?
I don't know.
There was a time when that would have been enough for me to dismiss the whole idea of God.
If God exists, I thought, and God is good, then explain this.
Explain suffering.
Explain evil.
Explain why one person receives a miracle while another person's prayers seem to disappear into silence.
I wanted God to make sense according to my understanding of what God should be.
Looking back, there was a certain arrogance in that.
If God is actually God—the creator of everything that exists—why would I expect to completely understand Him?
I don't understand the universe. I don't really understand consciousness. Half the time I don't understand the people closest to me.
There are days when I don't understand myself.
Yet somehow I thought the existence of God depended upon His ability to provide answers that satisfied me.
I don't think that anymore.
That doesn't solve the problem of suffering. And I don't particularly like explanations that make suffering sound simple.
There is nothing simple about watching someone you love suffer.
There is nothing intellectually satisfying about the suffering of a child.
Saying “God has a plan” may be true, but those words can sound terribly inadequate when spoken to someone whose world has just collapsed.
So I won't pretend I understand.
Free Will
One thing I understand better than I once did is the importance of free will.
Love cannot be forced.
If God created us capable of loving Him and loving one another, then He also created us capable of rejecting both.
We can be generous.
We can also be selfish.
We can forgive.
We can hate.
We can protect someone weaker than ourselves.
We can exploit them.
We can walk toward God.
And we can turn around and walk in exactly the opposite direction.
We do it every day.
I certainly do.
A tremendous amount of suffering in this world isn't difficult to explain at all. Human beings cause it.
The harder question is why God permits us to.
Again, I don't know.
But I wonder what we would be without that freedom.
If God prevented every selfish act before we committed it, stopped every lie before we told it, prevented every betrayal, every act of violence and every terrible decision, would we still be free?
And if we weren't free, could we actually love?
I don't know the answer.
But I have come to believe that freedom is inseparable from love, even though freedom gives us an extraordinary capacity to hurt one another.
Something Went Wrong
Catholicism goes further.
The Church teaches that something is wounded in the human condition itself.
The story begins with Adam and Eve and the Fall.
For years, I probably would have heard that and stopped listening.
Today I find it difficult to look at humanity—including myself—and conclude that everything is functioning exactly as it should.
We seem to know what is good and still choose something else.
I can know exactly what I believe God wants from me and still not want to do it.
Sometimes the alternative isn't even particularly attractive.
And I choose it anyway.
We want things that don't make us happy.
We repeat behavior that has already made us miserable.
We hurt people we love.
We put ourselves first and then wonder why we feel alone.
We acquire things and immediately begin wanting different things.
We achieve something we thought would finally satisfy us and discover that the satisfaction has an expiration date.
Something in us is restless.
Catholicism gives that condition a name and a history.
And Christianity makes an extraordinary claim about God's response to it.
He came here.
Jesus
This may be the most difficult thing Christianity asks us to believe.
Not simply that there is a God.
But that God entered His own creation.
That Jesus Christ was not merely a wise man or a moral teacher, but God made man.
That He suffered.
That He died.
And that He rose.
Christ came to redeem us—to do for humanity what humanity could not do for itself.
I believe that.
I don't pretend to understand the mystery of it completely.
But Christianity is not, at its center, the story of humanity successfully finding God.
It is the story of God refusing to abandon humanity.
That distinction means more to me the older I get.
Because I'm not particularly confident in humanity's ability to save itself.
I'm certainly not confident in my ability to save myself.
The World
Even knowing all of this, the world remains incredibly attractive.
I still want money.
I still want security.
I want the people I love to be safe.
I want comfort.
I want people to think well of me.
I want control over what happens tomorrow.
None of those desires is necessarily evil.
The problem begins when I ask them to give me something they cannot give.
Money can solve a lot of problems.
It cannot tell me why I exist.
Success can make life easier.
It cannot make death disappear.
Recognition can make the ego feel wonderful for a while.
It cannot tell me whether I am loved.
The strange thing is that I know this and still forget it constantly.
I can leave Mass thinking about God and be worried about money before I reach the car.
That may be one of the most honest descriptions of my faith.
I believe.
And then I forget.
I remember.
And then I get distracted.
I walk toward God.
Then something shiny appears in the other direction.
The Void
I've begun to recognize something about those periods when I move furthest away from God.
I become unhappy.
Not necessarily immediately.
Sometimes the things pulling me away feel very good at first.
Ego can feel good.
Money can feel good.
Being right can feel very good.
Anger can even feel good for a little while.
But eventually there is an emptiness.
For much of my life, my instinct was to fill that emptiness with more.
More work.
More money.
More activity.
More distraction.
More of whatever had failed to fill it the first time.
I am beginning to wonder whether the emptiness was never asking to be filled with something from the world.
Maybe it was pointing somewhere else.
Love
When I say God is only love, I don't mean that God is a sentimental feeling or that everything that happens in life is secretly pleasant.
I mean something much larger than that.
I believe love is not merely something God does.
It is what God is.
That creates another problem for me.
Because if God is only love, then God loves me.
Not some improved future version of me.
Me.
Knowing everything.
Every selfish thought.
Every failure.
Every sin.
Every moment of cowardice.
Every time I knew better and did it anyway.
Everything I wouldn't want another human being to know.
God already knows.
And He loves me.
I have a harder time believing that than I do believing God created the universe.
Maybe that's because I know myself better than I know the universe.
I don't understand why God loves me.
Maybe I'm not supposed to.
Maybe understanding love isn't the same thing as receiving it.
I Still Don't Know
None of this answers why a child gets cancer.
It doesn't explain why one family suffers terribly while another seems spared.
It doesn't explain earthquakes, disease or all the suffering human freedom doesn't appear to account for.
I still struggle with those things.
Maybe I always will.
Faith has not given me an answer sheet.
What it has given me is a different place from which to ask the questions.
Thirty years ago, suffering made me question whether God could exist.
Today suffering makes me ask what it means to trust a God I cannot completely understand.
That's not an answer.
It's simply where I am.
I believe God is love.
I believe He gave us freedom even though He knew what we would do with it.
I believe something in humanity is wounded.
I believe Christ came to redeem us.
I believe the Catholic Church carries these truths through history despite being entrusted to people as imperfect as I am.
And I believe that when I walk toward God, I become more of the person I am supposed to be.
When I walk away, something in me knows.
Maybe someday I'll understand more.
For now, I keep walking.
— Chris