Final Objections
And here we arrive at last at the final chapter of this series dedicated to the theme of divine punishment. I imagine that those who have followed it to this point must be exhausted — though surely no more so than I am. I sincerely hope it has served to deepen our understanding of this topic, which is by no means unimportant and which unfortunately suffers distortions that are spread in not a few Catholic parishes, even by priests. On this occasion I will analyze the arguments from Alejandro Bermúdez’s last two programs, titled “Why God Does Not Punish II” and “Why God Does Not Punish III,” published in the same place as the previous ones.
Let us begin…
Just Because We Cannot Always Be Certain When God Punishes, Does That Mean He Does Not?
One of Alejandro’s first arguments consists of alleging that since no one can have certainty that a particular evil is a divine punishment, this implies that God never punishes.
To try to prove his thesis, he draws on the relationship between a human father and his son and transfers it by analogy to the relationship between God and us. We know that when a father punishes his son, he clearly explains why he is doing so, so that the son understands what behavior he needs to correct. Since God does not seem to act in this manner, Alejandro concludes that God does not punish either, since to do so he would have to explain the reason to us, as a father does to his son.
Problems with This Argument
We have mentioned numerous examples from the New Testament in which it can be seen that God can punish both while revealing and without revealing his reasons. For example, when God punishes Zechariah by striking him mute until the birth of John the Baptist, the angel indicates that the reason is his lack of faith (Lk 1:18-19). The same is true in the case of Ananias and Sapphira, where Saint Peter reveals to them that they have sinned gravely against the Holy Spirit (Acts 5:1-10). But there are other cases where this does not happen, as when Herod blasphemes and falls ill until he dies (Acts 12:21-23). We know that he was punished because the Gospel tells us so, but there is no evidence that it was revealed to him. Similarly, when Christians fell ill and died for profaning the Eucharist, it is not clear that they knew this until Saint Paul warned them (1 Cor 11:29-30).
And here we come to the second flaw in this argument: it involves a false analogy. A false analogy is a type of fallacy in which the analogical argument is not supported by a relevant similarity or overlooks differences that prevent the conclusion. In this case, although God does indeed relate to us in a manner analogous to that of a “father,” this does not mean that we can transfer each characteristic of a human father-son relationship to the relationship between God and man. A human father, for example, communicates directly with his children, speaks with them face to face, embraces them, and clearly explains his reasons. God, by contrast, does not communicate with us in that way but makes use of secondary causes. If we take seriously Alejandro’s line of reasoning, we will have to conclude not only that God does not punish in this life, but also that he does not correct, does not educate, does not love, does not reward, and so on. Notice how, starting from a false analogy, one can arrive at absurd conclusions.
The solution, therefore, is not to conclude that God does not punish, but to understand that the medicinal function of penalties does not necessarily require that the person know that the penalty has been imposed for his sins. Suffering leads people to reflect and helps them make greater contact with reality, beginning to realize that their ways are wrong — if only by reasoning from the consequences. By way of illustration — and not because I consider the biblical examples insufficient — let me mention an anecdote drawn from the biography of Padre Pio of Pietrelcina, a stigmatized saint of the Catholic Church. It is recounted there that a young woman from Benevento came to ask for grace for her husband, who had gone completely blind. Padre Pio told her that his blindness was a punishment from God to save and purify him, because in his youth he had committed the grave sin of severely beating his father. The young woman, unable to believe it, told her husband, who initially denied it; but he finally confessed and acknowledged that at the age of sixteen he had indeed given his father a terrible beating with an iron rod.
Another element to bear in mind is that punishment is above all a restoration of the order of justice — and not always or necessarily corrective — as we have seen in the case of eternal punishment. As Saint Thomas explains, punishment contains an element of justice, and the corrective or medicinal element is added in certain cases. Indeed, it would be absurd for God to punish without wishing to restore the order of justice in the face of a sin, and to do so exclusively for a medicinal reason.
A good explanation of all this is given by Father Antonio Royo Marín, a respected theologian and author of more than thirty theological classics:
“624. 5. Effect. Since the subjective cause of sin is the defective will, the punishment must affect that same will. Indeed, it is of the very essence of punishment that it be contrary to the will; its effect is to act against the will of the sinner.”
Guilt is distinguished from punishment in that the former is voluntary and the latter is against the will of the one who deserved it. All the evils that befall the sinner as punishment for his fault, even if they do not fall directly upon his will itself, affect him only in relation to his will. This opposition or contrariety can be either to the actual will, or to the merely habitual will, or to the natural inclination of the will. For this reason it can happen that the sinner does not notice, at a given moment, that he is being punished for his sin, because the punishment does not oppose the actual will, but only the habitual one or the simple natural inclination of the will. Nothing goes unpunished in the moral order disturbed by sin, even though the sinner may not be aware of it.
“625. 6. Purpose. The act of sin makes man deserving of punishment insofar as it constitutes — as we have said — a transgression of the order of divine justice; an order to which man cannot return except through the reparation of punishment, which restores the balance of divine justice upset by sin. He who has voluntarily allowed himself a disordered pleasure or satisfaction is quite just, according to the order of divine justice, to suffer, willingly or by force, some pain or punishment contrary to his will.”
The purpose of punishment consists, then, essentially in compensating for this involuntary contrariety the voluntary contrariety by which the agent made himself guilty before the ordering principle, turning against it and against the end legitimately imposed by it. There exist, however, other accessory or secondary ends of punishment, such as the restoration of the order of justice violated by sin; the healing of the powers of the soul — of the will above all — which the preceding fault had disordered; the reparation of the scandal caused to others by sin, etc.
Are Natural Disasters a Punishment from God?
As a further argument, Alejandro attempts to prove that the Magisterium endorses his thesis. To this end, he mentions a recent debate in which Mons. Inos Biffi rebutted the claims of Professor Roberto de Mattei, a well-known traditionalist intellectual who had affirmed that the earthquake in Japan may have been the result of a divine punishment for the country’s sins. Alejandro adds that Inos Biffi responded at the request of the Holy See by publishing an article in important Catholic journals closely associated with the Vatican, such as La Civiltà Cattolica and L’Osservatore Romano.
Problems with This Argument
The first error in this argument is that it overlooks the fact that an article published in a Catholic journal — however respectable — is in no way Magisterium. Does the Holy See review what appears there in some way? Probably — but that does not make it Magisterium. Presenting an article in a Catholic journal as the official position of the Magisterium misleads his audience, who may end up treating as Magisterium something that is not.
Another error in that argument is that it decontextualizes the debate in the same way that Alejandro has been decontextualizing the Catechism of the Catholic Church and other Magisterial documents (Dives in Misericordia, Reconciliatio et Paenitentia, etc.). To understand why, however, we need to know the context of the discussion.
When a natural disaster of the magnitude of the earthquake in Japan occurs — where thousands and sometimes millions of people die — the pressing need is not so much to call into question whether God can punish, but rather to explain whether it is possible for God to send a punishment in which innocent and guilty alike suffer. In the specific case of the Japanese earthquake, a young girl wrote to Pope Benedict XVI to ask whether her parents’ death had been a divine punishment. An affirmation like that attributed to Professor Roberto de Mattei would wound the feelings of that girl and of many others without any justification — for it would be, at the very least, reckless. As we have been explaining in the previous chapters, unless one has a special revelation it is not possible to know with certainty whether a particular evil is the result of a divine punishment.
To illustrate what I mean by “reckless,” I will take as an example the well-known case of the Brazilian presidential candidate Tancredo Neves in the 1985 elections. Before the elections, the candidate had stated that if he received 500,000 additional votes, not even God could remove him from the presidency. Although he obtained those votes and won the election, he fell ill the day before taking office and subsequently died. Many people claimed that God had punished him for his blasphemy. In this case, although everything seems to point to the fact that this was indeed a divine punishment — in fact very similar to the case of Herod narrated in the Gospel, who fell ill after blaspheming — we do not have a special revelation that gives us certainty that it was truly so; therefore, it would be reckless to affirm it, and in such cases prudence requires us to await the answer in the next life.
Now, without claiming certainty about any specific case, can God punish through a catastrophe in which innocent people are also affected? The answer to this question is irrelevant to what we are analyzing, because even if one answered in the negative, that would not imply that he could not send punishments affecting only the guilty. This is therefore an entirely different debate.
What we can say with certainty, without entering into that debate, is that while the sins of some can affect others, no one can ever receive punishment in spiritual goods for the sin of another person. An explanation by Saint Thomas can help to understand this better:
“Punishment may be considered in two ways. First, as a punishment, and in this sense punishment is due only for sin, because by it the equality of justice is restored, in that he who by sinning exceeded the bounds of justice, enduring something against his will, suffers a corresponding loss. Consequently, since every sin is voluntary — including original sin, as explained elsewhere (I-II, Q. 81, a. 1) — it follows that no one is punished in this way except for a voluntary sin.
From another angle, punishment may be considered as a medicine — one that is not only curative of past sin, but also has the power to preserve from future sin and to move us to do good. According to this view, one is sometimes punished without personal guilt, yet never without cause. It must be kept in mind, however, that medicine never deprives one of a greater good in order to procure a lesser one — for example, leaving someone blind in order to cure a callus — but rather, at times causes harm to something lesser in order to help what is more important. And since spiritual goods are of the greatest value and temporal goods are of lesser value, it is for this reason that one is sometimes punished in the latter without personal guilt — for example, with many of the hardships of this present life, which God inflicts to serve as humiliation or as trial. In contrast, no one is punished in spiritual goods without personal guilt, neither in this life nor in the next; for in the next life punishments are no longer medicine but the consequence of spiritual condemnation.” [T.N.: This passage is drawn from Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Benziger Bros., 1947)]
(Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II-II, Q. 108, a. 4; trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province)
Salvifici Doloris — Out of Context?
Alejandro has also claimed that my friend Adrián Ferreira — who has also taken part in the debate — took out of context what Pope John Paul II said in the Apostolic Letter Salvifici Doloris. I myself cited other passages in which Pope John Paul II likewise affirmed that God does indeed punish (see, for example, the audience of July 25, 2001, titled “God Punishes and Saves”), but it is nevertheless appropriate to point out that the citation in question is not out of context. Let us read some excerpts from Salvifici Doloris:
“To moral evil — sin — there corresponds punishment, which is in keeping with the moral order in the same transcendent sense in which this order is established by the will of the Creator and Supreme Lawgiver. From this also derives one of the fundamental truths of religious faith, equally based on Revelation: God is a just judge, who rewards good and punishes evil […] If it is true that suffering has a meaning as punishment when it is connected with a fault, it is not true that all suffering is a consequence of a fault and has the nature of a punishment.” (John Paul II, Apostolic Letter Salvifici Doloris)
“Already in the Old Testament we note a trend to overcome the conviction that suffering has meaning only as a punishment for sin, insofar as there is also emphasized at the same time the educational significance of the suffering-penalty. In the sufferings inflicted by God upon the Chosen People there is present an invitation of His mercy, which corrects in order to lead to conversion: ‘The punishments do not come for destruction but for the correction of our people.'”
“The Book of Job does not undermine the foundations of the transcendent moral order, based on justice, as presented by Revelation in both the Old and New Testaments. But at the same time this book demonstrates with all clarity that the principles of this order cannot be applied in an exclusive and superficial way. While it is true that suffering has a meaning as punishment when it is connected with a fault, it is not true that all suffering is a consequence of a fault and has the nature of a punishment. The figure of the righteous man Job is an eloquent proof of this in the Old Testament. Revelation, which is the word of God himself, presents with full clarity the problem of the suffering of an innocent man: suffering without guilt. Job was not punished — there was no reason to inflict punishment on him — even though he was subjected to a most severe ordeal. In the introduction to the book it is stated that God permitted this ordeal to be inflicted on Job by Satan.”
The document requires little explanation, as it is quite clear. I will therefore make only a couple of observations.
First, note that it says: “The Book of Job does not undermine the foundations of the transcendent moral order based on justice, as presented by the whole of Revelation, both in the Old and New Testaments.” I begin here so that the excuse cannot be used again that, since the Book of Job belongs to the Old Testament, the Pope is not leaving a teaching valid for us. Remember that he is speaking of the transcendent moral order — and this encompasses both the Old and the New Covenant.
Now let us come to the key passage, which says: “It is true that suffering has a meaning as punishment when it is linked to guilt; it is not true, however, that all suffering is a consequence of guilt and has the character of a punishment” — which is precisely what we have been saying: not all suffering is punishment, but suffering that is linked to guilt is.
Does the Parable of the Prodigal Son Not Show That God Does Not Punish?
Another argument that recurs in Alejandro’s podcasts is the interpretation he offers of the parable of the Prodigal Son, in which the father showed compassion and did not punish his son after he had squandered his inheritance. From this he reasons that if the father did not punish, then in the same way God — who is a good father — will not punish us either.
But when we say that God can punish if he so determines, we are not denying that as sovereign Lord he has the right to be clement. Nor do we say that he is bound to apply a merely commutative justice. If we were to generalize from a parable whose purpose is to highlight mercy, we might end up believing, together with the Protestants, that purgatory does not exist — simply because Jesus was clement with the good thief and promised to be with him that very day in paradise. We must not forget that the same Jesus, in other passages where the main theme is each person’s personal accountability, warns of the punishment that awaits those who do not act accordingly: “The servant who knows what his master wants but has not even started to carry out those wishes will receive very many strokes of the lash. The servant who did not know, but acted in a way that deserved a beating, will receive fewer strokes. When someone is given a great deal, a great deal will be demanded of that person; when someone is entrusted with a great deal, of that person even more will be expected” (Lk 12:47-48).
Conclusions
With this I have concluded my analysis of all the arguments that Alejandro Bermúdez puts forward in his audio series (seven programs in total). I wish to express my special gratitude to Father José María Iraburu, to Luis Fernando Pérez, director of Infocatólica, and to Néstor Martínez, who counseled me on this subject. I am also grateful to those whose comments have contributed to enriching this work and have helped to significantly improve the final result, as well as to those who have patiently read each installment. I will add one more chapter after the digital book that Alejandro has promised to publish, if he introduces any additional argument worth analyzing.
God bless you.
