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We come from a big, close-knit Catholic family. Fifty grandchildren and counting. Holidays are loud, overlapping with laughter, tears, stories retold a hundred times, and voices rising in grace before meals. From the beginning, prayer was never just a discipline—it was the breath of our home, the light by which we navigated. But if we’ve learned anything, it’s this: it’s one thing to partake in sacred ritual; it’s another to be broken open by it. To have it rise up from beneath the floorboards of life and transfix you with its meaning. It’s the chasm between reciting canon law and becoming canonized. That chasm is filled with experience. And experience, often, is suffering.
We’ve seen that truth born in our daughter, Catherine—number four of seven (one in heaven). And I want to tell you her story. But to do that, I need to begin with a small whisper, spoken at a weekday Mass, by a little girl with great faith.
Her cousin Bernadette—one of twin daughters—had been fighting complex, life-threatening health issues from birth. The kind that few fully understood because her parents bore them so gracefully, without fanfare. But we all knew. She had been wrapped in our prayers for months, even years.
So on that quiet morning, during that familiar moment in the liturgy when the congregation echoed the words of the centurion—Only say the word, and I shall be healed—Catherine leaned over to her mom, Stephanie, and whispered with quiet urgency: “What is the word?”
Her mom gently asked what she meant.
“The word,” she said. “So that Bernadette can be healed. We just need to say it.”
There was no trace of doubt in her voice. Just radiant, childlike certainty.
That moment has lingered in our hearts. It wasn’t naivety—it was the raw, beautiful instinct of a child formed in a home where God is real, where Jesus heals, where miracles are not museum pieces but the natural atmosphere of the faithful. And the Church affirms this. Miracles are not historical residue; they are the living, beating heart of Christ’s continuing work through His Church. Through the sacraments. Through the saints. Through us. We believe it. We profess it. We’ve seen it.
And yet, there’s another truth.
That same Catherine—so full of trust and unshakable faith—has carried significant, painful, ongoing health challenges herself. We’ve sat across from top doctors of every specialty. We’ve followed protocols, treatments, nutritional plans, spiritual interventions. We’ve prayed over her. She’s been prayed over. And let me say this plainly: Catherine has not been healed. At least, not in the way we all longed for right now.
And yet . . . ask anyone who meets her. Ask the moms who insist they’d trust no one else to babysit their children but her. Ask her classmates and professors at Hillsdale College. Ask her siblings. There is something different about her. A gravity. A radiance. A strength forged in the fire.
She is not bitter. She is not broken. She is becoming holy.
The root of that word—holy—is whole.
We live in a culture where suffering is synonymous with failure. Where affliction is an interruption to the story rather than the means of its fulfillment. Where miracles are expected on demand and the absence of healing is blamed on lack of faith. Some of our children have wrestled with these ideas, often through well-meaning but misguided Evangelical voices suggesting that if someone remains sick, the fault lies in insufficient belief. We’ve had the debates. Sometimes late into the night. And we’ve come back to this unshakable, incarnational truth: our Faith does not promise freedom from suffering. It promises presence through it. It promises that suffering—though mysterious and often excruciating—is not meaningless.
In fact, all of us will suffer. Every person Jesus healed eventually died. Every apostle He chose endured agony. Every saint worth canonizing bore the marks of Christ not just in love, but in loss.
And there are saints far holier than I—men and women whose lives were ablaze with faith—who suffered more than I can even comprehend. Some without healing. Some without understanding. But none without hope.
Catherine gets this.
After a childhood bike accident, she refused the hospital until I had prayed over her. She knew something most spend a lifetime chasing—that God is the first resort, not the last. That holiness is found not in the absence of affliction, but in how we meet Him in it.
We often say we want to be like Christ. But Christ suffered. Christ wept. Christ sweat blood. Christ hung on a cross and felt the silence of the Father. He cried, “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?”—a cry not just of pain, but referencing a psalm that ends in triumph.
Even the demonic, as many trusted Catholic exorcists like Fr. Chad Ripperger and Fr. Carlos Martins will tell you, are under God’s authority. The devil is not some rogue entity challenging God. He is on a leash—tight and unyielding. And God permits his limited influence only to the extent that it can purify, refine, and forge the souls of His children. The gym analogy is apt: strength is forged through resistance. Through breaking down to be built up stronger.
The same is true in the spiritual life. God does not delight in suffering. But neither does He waste it. In the crucible of our affliction, He does His deepest work. And the goal is not mere survival. It is transformation. It is intimacy. It is communion.
Colossians 1:24 says, “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of His body, the Church.” This is not theology from the mountaintop. This is theology from the valley, written by a man imprisoned, beaten, and eventually beheaded.
Our faith must pass through fire, or it remains brittle. Catherine’s has. Ours has. And we are stronger for it—not because we sought suffering, but because we met Christ in it.
So why does God allow suffering? I don’t pretend to fully know. But I know this: He allowed it for Himself. He did not shield His own Son. And in Christ’s wounds, ours are not only made bearable—they are made meaningful.
And maybe, in the end, this is what it means to become a saint. Not perfection. Not comfort. But communion. Participation. Being made whole through surrender.
Perhaps that’s why the sacraments are so precious. Why the prayers are worth repeating. Why the rituals, rightly understood, are not empty—they are fire-tested ropes that tether us to heaven when the storm is raging.
That’s the great mystery. The thing Catherine, in her quiet holiness, already knows.
The Word is Jesus.
And He has been spoken.
And through Him, we are being healed—even when we don’t yet see it.
Image from Wikimedia Commons
