Karl Adam on Suffering

As I’ve mentioned before, I find it helpful to read Karl Adam alongside all this Kierkegaard. His Spirit of Catholicsm is a wonderful korrektiv for the Great Dane, never more so than in this paragraph on the conflict between the claims of personality and those of community, and the suffering that naturally results thereof.

Furthermore the special character of Catholicism gives rise to a conflict between the claims of personality and those of the community. The Church is primarily a community, it is that unity of redemption-needing mankind which is established in the person of the Incarnate God. But she is at the very same time a community of persons. The Church shows herself to be the living Body of Christ only in so far as she realizes herself in living persons. Both these things, therefore, both community and personality, are of the substance of the Church, and neither can subsist without the other. From out of the community of faith and of love the personality draws its new life. And the new-born personality in its turn gives the community the best that it has, the awakening and enkindling power of its faith and of its love, and thereby gives the community fruitfulness and growth. But a community implies a common life, and therefore there must be a definite norm for the community, a creed and a law. And the individual must willingly accept this norm, in dogma, morals, law and worship. Here is the point where conflict is possible. Individualities are too rich and too variously made—being each a unique historical creation, each the result of a separate and special word of God—to be able to adapt themselves always and everywhere, fully and without friction, to the organism of the community. There are bound to be interior difficulties and obstacles, and the process calls for self-sacrifice and devoted self-denying love. And the richer a personality is, the more does it suffer from the community, especially from that average level of life and its requirements which go necessarily with a common organization. It is true that the community richly repays whatever the personality sacrifices to it. The community exercises an educative force, for it compels the individual to love and sacrifice, to humility and simplicity. The community deepens our personalities, for it enlarges them by all that goodness which we show to our brethren and they to us. And- -its highest excellence—the community is the Body of Christ, the true sphere of all the truth and grace of Jesus. But however precious the community is, there remain sacrifice, and self-denial, and self-subordination and suffering with the members of Christ. For "if any member suffer, all the members suffer with it."