If God is good and all-powerful, why is there evil? It may be the hardest question anyone asks, and no quick answer is enough. The Christian faith does not offer a slogan but a whole story: creation, the Fall, and God's patient work of salvation, which leads to the cross and the Resurrection.
God created the world good, and He created angels and humans free, because love is possible only where there is freedom. But freedom can be misused. Some angels, led by Satan, rejected God forever. And our first parents, tempted, chose to trust themselves instead of God.
Original sin is the loss of the original holiness and justice that our first parents had received for all of us. Its effects remain in every person:
- Human nature is wounded but not totally corrupted: we can still know and choose what is good.
- Our minds are darkened and our wills weakened.
- We feel concupiscence, an inclination toward sin.
- Suffering and death entered the human story.
The Church distinguishes moral evil, the evil that people choose, from physical evil, such as disease and natural disasters in a world still on its way to perfection. God never causes moral evil, but He permits it, respecting the freedom He gave, and He can bring good out of it. The greatest evil ever done, the killing of God's Son, became the source of our salvation.
God did not leave us alone. From the first promise in Genesis 3:15, through the covenants and the prophets, He prepared a Savior. Saint Paul compares Adam and Christ: through one man's disobedience, sin and death entered the world; through one man's obedience, grace and life overflow for all.
We may never understand all the reasons for suffering in this life. But in Jesus, God entered our suffering and transformed it from the inside. Saint Paul wrote that “in everything God works for good with those who love him.” Christians face evil not with despair but with hope, and with love that fights evil wherever it can.