Unjustly Inflicted Suffering
April 7, 2026
Let us also love the resurrection, which reminds us that evil is not the last word, because it has been defeated by the Risen One. On this day of celebration, let us abandon every desire for conflict, domination, and power, and implore the Lord to grant his peace to a world ravaged by wars and marked by a hatred and indifference that makes us feel powerless in the face of evil. To the Lord we entrust all hearts that suffer and await the true peace that only he can give. Let us entrust ourselves to him and open our hearts to him! He is the only one who makes all things new (cf. Rev 21:5) (Pope Leo’s Easter 2026 greeting).
Following is the continuation of the first word of Christ from the Cross on Unjust Suffering (From The Cries of Jesus from the Cross, A Fulton J. Sheen’s Anthology).
The world is full of those who suffer unjustly and who, through no fault of their own, bear the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” What should be our attitude to those who speak untruly of us, who malign our good names, who steal our reputations, and who sneer at our acts of kindness?
The answer is to be found in the first word from
the Cross: forgive. If there was ever anyone who had a right to protest against
injustice, it was He who is Divine Justice; if ever there was anyone who was
entitled to reproach those who dug His hands and feet with steel, it was Our
Lord on the Cross.
And yet, at that very moment when a tree turns against Him and becomes a cross, when iron turns against Him and becomes nails, when roses turn against Him and become thorns, when men turn against Him and become executioners, He lets fall from His lips for the first time in the history of the world a prayer for enemies: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34).
Dwell for a moment on what He did not say. He did not say: “I am innocent,” and yet who else could have better claimed innocence? Many times before this Good Friday and many times since, men have been sent to a cross, a guillotine, or a scaffold, for a crime they never committed; but not one of them has ever failed to cry: “I am innocent.”
But Our Lord made no such protest, for it would have been to have falsely assumed that man is the judge of God. Now if Our Lord, who was Innocence, refrained from asserting His innocence, then we who are not without sin should not forever be crying our innocence.
To do this is wrongly to admit that man, and not
God, is our judge. Our souls are to be judged not before the tribunal of men,
but before the throne of the God of love, and He “who sees in secret will
reward in secret” (see Matt. 6:4). Our eternal salvation does not depend on how
the world judges us, but on how God judges us.
It matters little if our fellow citizens condemn us even when we are right, for Truth always finds its contradictors; that is why Truth is now nailed to a Cross. What does matter is that we be found right in God’s judgment, for on that our eternal happiness depends. There is every chance in the world that the two judgments will differ, for man sees only the face, but God reads the heart. We can fool men, but we cannot fool God.
There was another thing Our Blessed Lord did not say to the representatives of Caesar and the Temple who sent Him to the Cross — namely, “You are unjust.” The Father gave all judgment unto Him and yet He does not judge man and say: “You will suffer for this.” He knew, being God as well as man, that while there is life, there is hope, and His patient suffering before death might purchase the souls of many who now condemn.
Why judge them before the time for judgment? Longinus of the Roman army and Joseph of the Sanhedrin would come to His saving embrace and forgiveness even before He was taken down from the Cross. The sinner of this hour might be the saint of the next.
One reason for a long life is penance. Time is
given us not just to accumulate that which we cannot take with us, but to make
reparation for our sins.
That is why in the parable of the fig tree, which had not borne fruit for three years and which the owner wished to cut down because it “cumbereth the ground,” the dresser of the vineyard said: “Let it alone this year also, until I dig about it, and dung it. And if happily it bear fruit” (Luke13:6–9). So the Lord is with the wicked. He gives them another month, another year of life that they may dig their soul with penance and dung it with mortification, and happily save their souls.
If, then, the Lord did not judge His executioners before the hour of their judgment, why should we, who really know nothing about them anyway, judge them even when they do us wrong? While they live, may not our refraining from judgment be the very means of their conversion? In any case, judgment has not been given to us, and the world may be thankful that it has not, for God is a more merciful judge than man. “Judge not that you may not be judged” (Matt. 7:1).
What Our Lord did say on the Cross was forgive. Forgive your Pilates, who are too weak to defend your justice; forgive your Herods, who are too sensual to perceive your spirituality; forgive your Judases, who think worth is to be measured in terms of silver. “Forgive them — for they know not what they do.”
In that sentence is packed the united love of Father and Son, whereby the holy love of God met the sin of man and remained innocent. This first word of forgiveness is the strongest evidence of Our Lord’s absolute sinlessness. The rest of us at our death must witness the great parade of our sins, and the sight of them is so awful that we dare not go before God without a prayer for pardon.
Yet Jesus, on dying, craved no forgiveness, for He had no sin. The forgiveness He asked was for those who accused Him of sin. And the reason He asked for pardon was that “they know not what they do.”
He is God as well as man, which means He knows all the secrets of every human heart. Because He knows all, He can find an excuse: “they know not what they do.” But we know so little of our enemies’ hearts, and so little of the circumstances of their acts and the good faith mingled with their evil deeds, that we are less likely to find an excuse. Because we are ignorant of their hearts, we are apt to be less excusing.
In order to judge others, we must be inside them and outside them, but only God can do this. Our neighbors are just as impenetrable to us as we are to them. Judgment on our part, then, would be wrong, for to judge without a mandate is unjust. Our Lord alone has a mandate to judge; we have not.
If, possessing that mandate, and knowing all, He still found reason to forgive, then we who have no jurisdiction and who cannot possibly with our puny minds know our neighbors’ hearts, have only one thing left to do; that is, to pray: “Father, forgive . . . for they know not what they do.”
Our Lord used the word forgive because He was innocent and knew all, but we must use it for other reasons. Firstly, because we have been forgiven greater sins by God. Secondly, because only by forgiving can hate be banished from the world. And thirdly, because our own pardon is conditioned by the pardon we extend to others.
Firstly, we must forgive others because God has forgiven us. There is no injustice any human being has ever committed against us that is comparable to the injustice we commit against God by our sins. It is this idea that Our Lord suggests in the parable of the unmerciful servant, who was forgiven a debt of ten thousand talents by his master, and immediately afterward went out and choked a fellow servant who owed him only a hundred pence (Matt. 18:21–35). The debt, which the master forgave the servant was 1,250,000 times greater than the debt owed by the fellow servant. In this great disproportion is revealed how much greater are man’s sins against God than are the sins of our fellowmen against us. We must, therefore, forgive our enemies because we have been forgiven the greater sin of treating God as an enemy.
And if we do not forgive the sins of our enemies, it is very likely because we have never cast up our accounts with God. Herein is to be found the secret of so much of the violence and bitterness of some men in our modern world; they refuse to think of themselves as ever having offended God and therefore never think of themselves as needing pardon.
They think they need no pardon; hence no one else should ever have it. The man who knows not his own guilt before God is apt to be most unforgiving to others, as David at the time of his worst sin.
Our condemnation is often the veil for our own weakness: we cover up our nakedness with the mantle of criticism; we see the mote in our brother’s eye, but never the beam in our own. We carry all our neighbor’s faults in a sack in front of us, and all our own in a sack behind us.
The cruelest master is the man who never learned to obey, and the severest judge is the man who never examines his own conscience. The man who is conscious of his need of absolution is the one who is most likely to be indulgent to others.
Such was Paul, who, writing to Titus, finds a reason for being merciful to men: “For we ourselves also were some time unwise, incredulous, erring, slaves to diverse desires and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hateful, and hating one another” (Titus 3:3).
It is the forgetfulness of its own sins that makes modern hate so deep and bitter. Men throttle their neighbor for a penny because they forget God forgave them a debt of ten thousand talents. Let them only think of how good God has been to them, and they will begin to be good to others.
A second reason for forgiving those who make us
suffer unjustly is that if we do not forgive, hate will multiply until the
whole world is hateful. Hate is extremely fertile; it reproduces itself with
amazing rapidity.
Communism knows that hate can disrupt society more quickly than armies; that is why it never speaks of charity. That too is why it sows hatred in labor against capital; hatred in atheists against religion; hatred in themselves against all who oppose them.
How can all this hatred be stopped when one man is slapping another on the cheek? There is only one way, and that is by turning the other cheek which means: I forgive; I refuse to hate you. If I hate you, I will add my quota to the sum total of hate. This I refuse to do. I will kill your hate; I will drive it from the earth. I will love you.”
That was the way Stephen conquered the hate of those who killed him; namely, by praying: “Lord, lay not this sin to their charge” (Acts 7:59). He was practically repeating the first word from the Cross.
And that prayer of forgiveness won over the heart of a young man named Saul who stood nearby, holding the garments of those who stoned him, and “consenting to his death.” If Stephen had cursed Saul, Saul might never have become St. Paul. What a loss that would have been! But hate lost the day because Stephen forgave.
In our day love is still winning victories over hate. When Father Pro of Mexico, was shot by the Mexican revolutionists, he turned to them and said: “I forgive you; kneel and I will give you my blessing.” And every soldier in the firing line fell on his knees for the blessing.
It was a beautiful spectacle indeed to see a man forgiving those who are about to kill him! Only the captain refused to kneel, and it was he who did what to Father Pro was an act of great kindness — ushered him, by a blow through the heart, into the company of Stephen, a martyr of the Church of God.
During the Civil War in Spain when the Reds were slaughtering hundreds of priests, one of them was lined up before the firing squad with his arms tightly bound by ropes. Facing the firing squad, he said: “Untie these ropes and let me give you my blessing before I die.” The communists untied the ropes, but they cut off his hands. Then sarcastically they said: “All right, see if you can give us your blessing now.” And the priest raised the stumps of his arms as crimson rags and with blood dripping from them like beads forming on the earth the red rosary of redemption, he moved them about in the form of a cross. Thus, hate was defeated, for he refused to nourish it. Hate died as he forgave, and the world has been better for it.
Finally, we must forgive others, for on no other condition will our own sins be forgiven. In fact, it is almost a moral impossibility for God to forgive us unless we, in turn, forgive. Has He not said: “Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy” (Matt. 5:7)? “Forgive, and you shall be forgiven. Give, and it shall be given unto you. . . . For with the same measure that you shall mete withal, it shall be measured to you again” (Luke 6:37–38).
The law is inescapable. Unless we sow, we shall not reap; unless we show mercy to our fellow men, God will revoke His mercy toward us. As in the parable, the master canceled the forgiveness of the servant because he refused to show a smaller mercy to his fellowman, “so also shall my heavenly Father do to you, if you forgive not every one of your brothers from your hearts” (Matt. 18:35).
If a box is filled with salt, it cannot be filled with sand, and if our hearts are filled with hatred of our neighbor, how can God fill them with His love? It is just as simple as that. There can be, and there will be, no mercy toward us unless we ourselves are merciful. The real test of the Christian, then, is not how much he loves his friends, but how much he loves his enemies.
The divine command is clear:
Love your enemies: do good to them that hate you: and pray for them that persecute and calumniate you: that you may be the children of your Father who is in heaven, who maketh his sun to rise upon the good, and bad, and raineth upon the just and the unjust. For if you love them, that love you, what reward shall you have? Do not even the publicans this? And if you salute your brethren only, what do you more? Do not also the heathens this? (Matt. 5:44–47)
Forgive, then! Forgive even seventy times seven times! Soften the pillow of death by forgiving your enemies their little sins against you, that you may be forgiven your great sins against God. Forgive those who hate you, that you may conquer them by love. Forgive those who injure you, that you may be forgiven your offenses. Our world is so full of hate!
The race of the clenched fists is multiplying like the race of Cain. The struggle for existence has become existence for struggle. There are even those who talk about peace only because they want the world to wait until they are strong enough for war.
Dear Lord, what can we, Thy followers, do to bring peace to the world? How can we stop brother rising against brother and class against class, blurring the very sky with their cross-covered Golgothas? Thy First word on the Cross gives the answer: we must see in the body of every man who hates, a soul that was made to love. If we are too easily offended by their hate, it is because we have forgotten either the destiny of their souls or our own sins. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. Forgive us forever having been offended. Then we, like Thee, may find among our executioners another Longinus, who had forgotten there was love in a heart until he opened it with a lance.
— The Rainbow of Sorrow
The Holy Father started his Easter 2026 greetings with “For centuries, the Church has joyfully sung of the event that is the origin and foundation of her faith: “Yes, Christ my hope is arisen / Christ indeed from death is risen / Have mercy, victor King, ever reigning” (Easter Sequence).
Let us reflect once again in our quiet moments of dialogue
with Our Lord on the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Jesus in which we all
participated during the Paschal Triduum, Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Black
Saturday and Easter Sunday. Let us tell
Him what is in our minds and hearts; ask Him about His sentiments; and what He
would like each one of us to do for Him from now, onwards throughout our life.
With joyful hope, love and gratitude, let us pray with Our
Lady, the Regina Coeli instead of the Angelus for the whole season of Easter, that
is, until Pentecost Sunday.
∙ Regina Cæli
(English)
R/. For
He whom you did merit to bear, alleluia.
V/. Has
risen, as he said, alleluia.
R/.
Pray for us to God, alleluia.
V/.
Rejoice and be glad, O Virgin Mary, alleluia.
R/. For
the Lord has truly risen, alleluia.
Let us
pray. O God, who gave joy to the world through the resurrection of Thy Son, our
Lord Jesus Christ, grant we beseech Thee, that through the intercession of the
Virgin Mary, His Mother, we may obtain the joys of everlasting life. Through
the same Christ our Lord.
R/.
Amen.
∙ Regina Cæli
(Latin)
V/. Regina cæli, lætare; alleluia.
R/.
Quia quem meruisti portare; alleluia.
V/. Resurrexit
sicut dixit; alleluia.
R/. Ora
pro nobis Deum; alleluia.
V/.
Gaude et lætare, Virgo Maria; alleluia.
R/.
Quia surrexit Dominus vere; alleluia.
Oremus:
Deus,
qui per resurrectionem Filii tui Domini nostri Iesu Christi mundum lætificare
dignatus es, præsta, quæsumus, ut per eius Genetricem Virginem Mariam perpetuæ
capiamus gaudia vitæ. Per eundem Christum Dominum nostrum.
R/.
Amen.
See you in the next post, “May tomorrow be a perfect day; may you find love and laughter along the way; may God keep you in his tender care; ‘til He brings us together again.”
Affectionately,
Guadalupinky
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