Temptation

Falling to temptation can bring undue suffering.


Every Christian knows what it is to experience temptation and to suffer from sin, both ours, and those of others. But we believe that God restores, confirms, strengthens, and establishes us after we suffer for a while because he is merciful to repentant sinners and brings good out of evil.


12 Things to Know About Temptation:

1. Temptation is an attraction, either from outside oneself or from within, to act contrary to right reason and the commandments of God (CCC 538).
2. The capital sins: pride, greed, envy, anger, lust, gluttony, and sloth/laziness are at the root of all temptation.
3. “Man is never wholly free from temptation… but with patience and true humility we become stronger than any enemy” (Pope Benedict XVI).
4. “The patience and humility required to defeat the enemy come by following Christ every day and from learning to build our life not outside of him” (Pope Benedict XVI).
5. The victory that conquers the world is our faith (1 John 5:4). When we fall, begin again in faith.
6. The gift of faith is dynamic. It leads us into God’s victory over temptation and sin.
7. The opposite of faith in God is pride because a proud person thinks that everything depends on him, as if God did not exist in his life. Self-reliance in the face of temptation is folly.
8. Temptation closes us in, takes away the ability to see ahead, closes every horizon and in this way leads us to sin” (Pope Francis).
9. Christ is always willing to teach us how to escape from temptation. Jesus is great because he not only brings us out of temptation, but also gives us more confidence (Pope Francis).
10. If our faith becomes lukewarm and has no expression, God can allow us to fall. God does not want evil but may want its consequences, since the consequences of evil impart grace and the call to be converted (Fr. Tadeusz Dajczar).
11. “No trial has come to you but what is human. God is faithful and will not let you be tried beyond your strength, but with the trial he will also provide a way out, so that you may be able to bear it” (1 Cor. 10:13).
12. When our bond of love for God is fortified by sacramental confession, our spiritual armor is strengthened for resisting continuous temptations from the world, the flesh and the devil.

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If God Exists Why Is There Suffering

This video gives a fairly clear answer to an age-old question: if God exists and he is all good and powerful, then why do people, especially the innocent, suffer? In his argument, Peter Kreeft basically says that the fact we even say “it’s not fair” is a proof that God exists, because it points to a pre-conceived notion of what justice is; one that we didn’t come up with, but have natural sense of. Suffering is difficult to understand precisely because it isn’t fair – because it happens at random, to the good and the bad without discrimination. And when we say that this isn’t right, that it defies logic, we are pointing to a standard of what is good and what is just that all of us hold, but which isn’t limited to our personal opinions – it is a notion that was given to us, and we can know that God is good precisely because we know what good and bad, right and wrong are. If there were nothing or no one that is goodness in itself, we would have no concept of what goodness is, or what of goes against that goodness.


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Interior Life

The contemplative life is the life of Heaven. There, all the works of the active life will disappear. In Heaven, there will be no passions to contend with, or neighbors to help, or miseries to bear. The life of the blessed is an eternal contemplation: they see God, love Him, and are united to Him in an indissoluble embrace. This is the true life.


And God in His goodness has desired that even in this life, we should exercise ourselves in that which will con­stitute our eternal life. Already here below we can contemplate Him, although in the mists of faith. Already here below we can love Him, and with the same love of Heaven, although it does not produce in us the same ef­fects as in the blessed. This is the true life; all else is fad­ing and transitory. For this reason, our Lord told Martha that she was concerned about many things when only one thing was necessary and, on the other hand, that Mary had chosen the better part, and that it would never be taken from her. In this way, our Lord Himself teaches us that the contemplative life is better than the active, and that it will never be taken from the soul who has chosen it.


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God's Plan For Your Life

We suffer because the world is fallen.  We can use the suffering as part of God's plan.


How are we to discover God’s plan for us? I think too many of us look for a great sign and fail to hear the quiet voice of God when He speaks to us in our hearts and through others. So here are what I believe are five essentials for discovering and living God’s Will:

1. Live in Christ’s Friendship – We Catholics refer to this as being in a state of grace. That is, live the sacramental life and, particularly, seek forgiveness in the Sacrament of Reconciliation whenever you become aware of committing a grave sin. Mortal sin particularly deafens our spiritual hearing.
2. Practice Humility and Surrender to the Lord – We are all inclined to be prideful. If we think we already have all the answers, we won’t be open to new ones, so get into the habit of practicing humility daily. Humbly surrender your will to the Lord.
3. Pray Daily – Do we really love God above all else? Then we should be praying before and above all else. That’s what you do when you love someone; you spend time in their company. Prayer is spending time with God. In prayer, we must ask God to reveal His Will to us.
4. Be Aware and Listen – Do you normally limit your prayer to speaking to God? If so, you need to set aside time during and after your prayer to listen. Trust Jesus. He said, “Seek and you will find, ask and you will receive, knock and the door will be opened.” Have faith that God will answer and you will discover that answer—one way or the other.
5. Decide to Act – The desire to live God’s Will is not the same as the decision to live God’s Will. The former is a feeling; the latter is an act of human will. This is not always easy and it can sometimes be painful, but you can believe that God has only the good for you in His answer. We cannot always see very far down the road.  We won’t always understand the specific purpose and end, beyond our own salvation, for our actions and decisions that God has in His Plan of Divine Providence for us. It is only ours to trust and act.

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The Enemy Within

The Church is our refuge in time of need during our suffering.  Christ indeed is our consoler.  But we must be careful and discerning too.  There are wolves among the sheep.


Benedict XVI said that ‘the greatest persecution of the Church does not come from outside enemies, but is born out of the sin within the Church, so the Church has a deep need to re-learn penitence and accept purification’.  At the time, the crisis of the scandal of pedophile priests was at its peak, and Benedict, who was fighting it with all his might, particularly referred to that. But there is no doubt that his ‘penitential’ Church, which sees itself as needy of forgiveness and purification, was not liked by the most popular interpreters of his pontificate.

At the same time, the words spoken by Cardinal Giovanni Benelli, few days before his death, also seem enlightening. It was the 8th October 1982, and the former Substitute for the Holy See under Paul VI, was speaking to the seminarians of the dioceses of Florence. He said, ‘who are the opponents? Let us think well, who are the biggest opponents of Jesus? They are the religious, those who most abide by God’s word… Religion was the great obstacle that Christ found on earth. It is religion, religious men, who in the end sent him to die. The opposition comes from the closest people rather than the furthest. The opposition, the resistance that the Gospel finds, is actually strongest, more deeply rooted and more enduring in our own home than it is outside’.

Benelli also described the ‘men who have settled in the Church, they have found their means of fulfillment in the Church, be they bishops, priests, baptized. They have settled and they are the biggest and most effective opponents to the newness of the Gospel, the repeated newness, that needs to repeat itself forever, it must resurface as news and must of course offend the sensibilities of those who are now seated, those who are well settled in the Church…’

The cardinal added that ‘it is people who observe, claim to observe, think that they are following God’s commandments, but in the end, they do not serve the Church, they serve themselves. They use the Church and protect their laziness, they protect interests which they might not be fully aware of, but they protect themselves, their own point of view’.


The Florentine cardinal, a diplomat and the undisputed protagonist of the Vatican scene in the 70s, concluded that ‘it is not the opponents, not the ideologies against Christianity, not those who are on the other side, they are not the great enemies. The biggest enemies are the Christians who have settled, who have built their own version of religion…’


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