Don't Cry. It's a Waste of Good Suffering.

Over at GetReligion, Jeremy Lott joins the hubbub over William F. Buckley's recent column, in which the National Review founder wishes that His Holiness John Paul II would just die already. Says Lott:

I was not surprised that Buckley wrote this column or that it generated a lot of debate. Buckley has been dropping broad hints lately that old age is closing in on him. This has affected the way he thinks about this world and whatever comes next…

(Special bonus: Only three comments in, one of Lott's readers notes that libertarians just don't GET something.)

My guess: Buckley's touching a nerve because he's forcing attention on the Catholic Church's belief in the redemptive power of suffering, something most people are aware of at a general level but don't recognize as being absolutely central to Catholicism. I suspect I'm not the only one who was taught as a callow youth that literally any pain you endure—even down to jamming your toe*—can be "offered up to God" as a good work of sorts. Just as mortification of the flesh has passed out of fashion in the West, it's hard for secular Americans to respect the idea that it's good for the Pope to be suffering like this, not because it shows his strength or tests his character but because suffering, in and of itself, is good. (Peggy Noonan, who's always willing to share the pain, gets at this a bit in her own Pope column.)

Same thing with Lenten sacrifices, which get misinterpreted as a device to remind you that the life of the spirit is superior to the life of the body—both a cultural error and a theological one, since in fact your soul and glorified body will be reunited on the Last Day. Giving something up for Lent is solely about deprivation; that's why you're specifically advised not just to give up smoking or eating sweets or anything else you'd give up as a New Year's resolution, but to give up something that you will miss and that isn't harmful to you. (Harmful stuff like yanking it you're supposed to have permanently given up anyway.)

In the long run, the real divisions over The Passion of the Christ probably weren't about anti-Semitism or violence or anything like that: They were about suffering, and how the glorification of suffering seems so weird to so many. Almost without exception, you could measure how deeply a person had absorbed the abstract traditions of Protestantism by how shocking they found the movie. (I realize this seems counterintuitive given how many non-Catholic Christians liked the movie, but I think what really eats Protestants is their suspicion that deep down the Catholics are right.)

* Yes, I know, jamming your toe hurts like a bitch, but it doesn't really have the majesty of terminal illness.