Bill Luse quotes the Pope:
...from the Pope's Apostolic Letter, Salvifici Doloris: "In bringing about the Redemption through suffering, Christ has also raised human suffering to the level of the Redemption. Thus each man, in his suffering, can also become a sharer in the redemptive suffering of Christ..."...Joseph Butler once that if "we had set down the world according to our specifications, it would not be the world as we know it". William Buckley responds in "Nearer My God":
If I am wrong, at least I am wrong with my Church, to whose infallible character I have sworn allegiance. Perhaps I'm overly sentimental in clinging to the fervent hope that God's mercy would extend to those who, though not of their own volition matriculating members of that Mystical Body, might in their last moment of terror have cried out in the spirit, beseeching God that he would not abandon them; that He might consider them among those who, though "not of this fold", He would gather to Himself.
I will not say - if he truly holds the contrary on this last point - that Mr. Hart's assertions are absurd, obscene, or grotesque, but will be content with the conviction that he is in the grip of grave error.
It's amazing what the Butler Escape, as I'll refer to it, does. This singular invitation to imagine reordering the world by you. (No rock music say.) But to disport with Butler at any length is to experience the awful thinness of the air at the summit of Hubris. We climb down from the mountain and find ourselves face-to-face with only two alternatives: reject the Christianity that asserts the unwelcome doctrine; or accept Christianity, irrespective of our incapacity to understand, or our disinclination to approve of, this or that doctrine.
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