And, therefore, my own good daughter, do not let your mind be troubled over anything that shall happen to me in this world. Nothing can come but what God wills. And I am very sure that whatever that be, however bad it may seem, it shall indeed be the best. (Saint Thomas More to his daughter Margaret, from the Tower of London)
If there is one thing Passiontide tells us, it’s that God brings good out of evil, and out of the greatest evil – the murder of the Christ, as Pope John Paul put it in Salvifici Doloris God-made-Man – God brings the greatest good, our eternal salvation. Behold, I make all things new….
The world has by and large lost sight of this good news, for so many consider nothing but the confining confines of this world alone. Just as Pius XII declared in 1946, in the wake of the horrors of World War II, that the greatest sin of this century was the loss of the sense of sin, so too, obversely, we may say that one of the greatest tragedies of our age is a corresponding loss of the sense of good, that is, our true good, and not all the tinsel and baubles that surround us in this passing pilgrimage.