The Catechism of the Council of Trent on the Reasons for and Sufferings of Christ in the Passion

The reasons why the Saviour suffered are also to be explained, that thus the greatness and intensity of the divine love towards us may the more fully appear. Should anyone inquire why the Son of God underwent His most bitter Passion, he will find that besides the guilt inherited from our first parents the principal causes were the vice's and crimes which have been perpetrated from the beginning of the world to the present day and those which will be committed to the end of time. In His Passion and death the Son of God, our Saviour, intended to atone for and blot out the sins of all ages, to offer for them to his Father a full and abundant satisfaction.

Besides, to increase the dignity of this mystery, Christ not only suffered for sinners, but even for those who were the very authors and ministers of all the torments He endured. Of this the Apostle reminds us in these words addressed to the Hebrews: Think diligently upon him that endured such opposition from sinners against himself; that you be not wearied, fainting in your minds. In this guilt are involved all those who fall frequently into sin; for, as our sins consigned Christ the Lord to the death of the cross, most certainly those who wallow in sin and iniquity crucify to themselves again the Son of God, as far as in them lies, and make a mockery of Him. This guilt seems more enormous in us than in the Jews, since according to the testimony of the same Apostle: If they had known it, they would never have crucified the Lord of glory; while we, on the contrary, professing to know Him, yet denying Him by our actions, seem in some sort to lay violent hands on him.

But that Christ the Lord was also delivered over to death by the Father and by Himself, the Scriptures bear witness. For in Isaias (God the Father) says For the wickedness of my people have I struck him. And a little before the same Prophet filled with the Spirit of God, cried out, as he saw the Lord covered with stripes and wounds: All we like sheep have gone astray, every one hath turned aside into his own way: and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all. But of the Son it is written: If he shall lay down his life for sin, he shall see a longlived seed. This the Apostle expresses in language still stronger when, in order to show how confidently we, on our part, should trust in the boundless mercy and goodness of God, he says: He that spared not even his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how hath he not also, with him, given us all things?

The next subject of the pastor's instruction is the bitterness of the Redeemer's Passion. If we bear m mind that his sweat became as drops of blood, trickling down upon the ground, and this, at the sole anticipation of the torments and agony which He was about to endure, we must at once perceive that His sorrows admitted of no increase. For if the very idea of impending evils was overwhelming, and the sweat of blood shows that it was, what are we to suppose their actual endurance to have been ?

That Christ our Lord suffered the most excruciating torments of mind and body is certain. In the first place, there was no part of His body that did not experience the most agonising torture. His hands and feet were fastened with nails to the cross; His head was pierced with thorns and smitten with a reed; His face was befouled with spittle and buffeted with blows; His whole body was covered with stripes.

Furthermore men of all ranks and conditions were gathered together against the Lord, and against his Christ. Gentiles and Jews were the advisers, the authors, the ministers of His Passion: Judas betrayed Him, Peter denied Him, all the rest deserted Him.

And while He hangs from the cross are we not at a loss which to deplore, His agony, or His ignominy, or both? Surely no death more shameful, none more cruel, could have been devised than this. It was the punishment usually reserved for the most guilty and atrocious malefactors, a death whose slowness aggravated the exquisite pain and torture!

His agony was increased by the very constitution and frame of His body. Formed by the power of the Holy Ghost, it was more perfect and better organised than the bodies of other men can be, and was therefore endowed with a superior susceptibility and a keener sense of all the torments which it endured.

And as to His interior anguish of soul, that too was no doubt extreme; for those among the Saints who had to endure torments and tortures were not without consolation from above, which enabled them not only to bear their sufferings patiently, but in many instances, to feel, in the very midst of them, filled with interior joy. I rejoice, says the Apostle, in my sufferings for you, and fill up those things that are wanting of the sufferings of Christ, in my flesh, for his body, which is the church;' and in another place: I am filled with comfort, I exceedingly abound with joy in all our tribulations. Christ our Lord tempered with no admixture of sweetness the bitter chalice of His Passion but permitted His human nature to feel as acutely every species of torment as if He were only man, and not also God.

Lest anyone think the teaching of the Vatican II document "Nostra Aetate" that the Jew are not as a people collectively culpable of the death of Jesus is a novelty, I reproduce above the pertinent sections from the Roman Catechism of the Council of Trent on the reasons why Christ suffered for the sins of all humanity and how He gave himself up freely. The following section on the bitterness of Christ's passion is also interesting in light of the criticisms of "The Passion of the Christ" for excessive violence.

Golly willikers! It's almost as if the teaching of the Church has been a continuum from the beginning to the present.

Who could have imagined that?

When in discussion with a "spirit of V2" person it always helps to actually look up the documents and quote them. The "spirit" person rarely has any idea what the documents actually say.

I actually had a "spirit" person tell me the Catechism's teaching about sacramental Confession were based on Trent and that made them out of date. Yoicks!

That may be a "spirit" speaking but I'm not sure it's the Holy Spirit.

Thank you for posting this. This has always been Catholic teaching. The problem comes with failing to make the distinction between collective guilt--which the Jews have not accrued as a people--and the guilt that clearly belonged to the Sanhedrin which engineered Jesus' execution. This is why the chief rabbi's recent appeal to the Pope is ambiguous. Is he asking that the notion of collective guilt be removed? Or is he asking that the Holy See deny that the ancient Jewish leadership had sought Jesus' death, pressuring Pilate to execute him--which is what some would claim?

Obviously the Gospels affirm that the ancient Jewish leadership had engineered Christ's death. But more than this, this statement from Trent supports Gibson's traditional approach to the Passion, which puts its entire emphasis on the suffering Jesus. It is this orthodoxy which is opposed so emphatically not only by the secular community, but also by liberal clergy and theologians who vociferously reject the doctrine of Propitiation. This is because modern theologians find it inconceivable that a loving God should have exacted such a horrific price from His only begotten Son. They argue such a notion is self-contradictory and repulsive. It seems to them Medieval.

Trent argues the redemptive price was indeed exacted and paid--because the Father so loved the world that He sent His Beloved Son precisely for this reason--to suffer and die--just as Scripture says. Gibson dramatizes this conventional theology--which is totally foreign and even pornographic to the secular press. The film's secular critics see only what the Romans saw--a man's body being tormented and ruined; such critics miss the larger drama being played out, beginning with the crushing of the serpent's head as an echo of the promise of Genesis following the Fall. Liberal theologians find themselves in league with these critics, though they see the same film not as pornographic, but as affirming a propitiatory theology they reject. Orthodox Christians, on the other hand, find in the Crucifixion what Scripture has always insisted we should--that Jesus deliberately willed Himself to die to pay the price for our sins.

The film is therefore a tremendous affront to the new thinking in theological circles and to the secular community. Both groups oppose the film as setting-back on their heels their respective movements, either to lead the faithful away from faith in general or, in particular, away from a theology no longer believed to be relevant or reasonable.

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