Enemy of faith: not unbelief, but sentimentality: wrongheaded understanding of cross and suffering played out in deaths of Terri Schiavo and John Paul II

Catholic New Times, March 8, 2005 by Ronald Trojcak

The deaths of Terri Schiavo and John Paul II attracted extraordinary attention from the mass media.

In these cases, attention was given, not merely as straight reportage, but in a wide range of interpretation. In Ms. Schiavo's case, not only were many medical-ethical views offered, but the politicization of her death was stark and stunning. Then, the interpretations of the pope's illness and death were even more varied. They were made not just of a celebrity--though the pope was certainly that--but of a major political, moral and religious figure.

The interpretations within each of these categories varied widely, moving across the spectrum from silly sentimentality to sour cynicism.

I want to address what I see as a profoundly misleading and wrongheaded reading of the meaning of these deaths, to examine the understanding of the suffering attendant on these deaths. Here, too, a qualification is called for, because neither the reality, nor the measure of Ms. Schiavo's suffering, seems to have been clear.

I believe that the main source of misunderstanding is that such suffering as these two people may have endured was drastically decontextualized, and so, drastically misread.

We can begin by noting that Schiavo's and the pope's suffering seems to have been seen simply as a quantum, a discrete fact or an object existing in and by itself. But this also needs qualification because the quantum was contained within a vaguely religious context, one with a strong Roman Catholic overtone. It is just here that the real problem emerges.

Suffering: holy and sanctified?

As a young altar boy, I had to serve at Friday services called the "Sorrowful Mother Novena." (It was not really even a novena, which ends after nine instances. It went on interminably, week after week.) One of the prayers asked for "more to suffer my God, ah more!" My sister was a nun for about ten years, and was told by her superior, "My job is to crucify you," a job the superior accomplished by embarrassing, demeaning and shaming my sister at every opportunity.

In the eight and a half years I spent in three different seminaries, a message was clearly conveyed: suffering of any kind was, in and of itself, holy: "If it feels bad, it must be good for you." I suspect that what I'm getting at is clear, even familiar, at least to Catholics of a certain age. Suffering of any kind was quickly "sanctified" by being identified with Jesus' experience on the cross. Indeed, every pain or discomfort was to be "offered up," and was seen as a God-sent "cross" for me to bear.

Let me add an aggravating and non-religious cultural fact, which contributes greatly to the misconstrual of suffering. A brief visit to any pharmacy shows that we in the so-called developed world, live in an analgesic society. Pain of any sort--recall the "heartbreak of psoriasis"--is unwarranted, indecent, improper, inappropriate. However, it's always remediable. The enormous energy and money we expend to produce and purchase remedies for fallen arches, dry skin or body odour eloquently speak of our sense that any kind of pain is, as an old aspirin ad had it, "unfair." Given this cultural setting, it is a fairly easy move to translate halitosis or hangnail, pancreatic cancer or Parkinson's disease, into our participation in the cross of Jesus.

The matter of decontextualization is becoming clear. I am proposing that it is not that I suffer, or what I suffer, or even how I suffer, that leads us to the meaning of the Cross. Rather, to ask why I suffer offers the only true entree to the meaning of the cross. So when people make posters with a picture of Terri Schiavo juxtaposed with Jesus on the cross, the message is all wrong. Terri Schiavo was bulimic. This caused an episode of oxygen deprivation to her brain that left her in a persistent vegetative state. This is why and how she survived for fifteen years.

I surely do not presume to know her inner life, but the public response to her was not based on any reference to her inner life, but simply to her biological condition. To a great extent, this is just the case with responses to the Pope in his final days.

Yes, we are a death-denying society; yes, we do warehouse old and invalided people. The societal response to the aged-sick is evil. But simply being old and sick is not of itself virtuous, but merely the normal and universal wear and tear of human life. Yet, Joseph Ratzinger, in his homily for the pope's funeral, referred to the "priestliness" of the pope's final public appearance, where he tried, unsuccessfully, to speak to thousands in St. Peter's square. Ratzinger is a trained theologian, but here his language is simply wrong. To speak of priesthood is to speak of sacrifice, which is to speak of salvation. The Pope's gesture may engender admiration, or pity, or encouragement. But it is not, except in the most attenuated way, if at all, salvific.

Jesus' death a witness to truth

The paradigm for salvific suffering is Jesus crucified. The "why" of Jesus' suffering is determinative. Jesus' death, as John's Gospel has it, was the consequence of His witness to the truth. Full stop.