Cry of the Heart by Msgr. Lorenzo Albacete

Review of Cry of the Heart: On The Meaning of Suffering by Msgr. Lorenzo Albacete
Slant Books, 2023; 116 pp.; $16 (paperback)

It is quite fitting that this little text, which addresses such a big mystery, be bookended on both sides by descriptions of the author himself, written by people who knew him personally. Msgr. Lorenzo Albacete was a paradigmatic Christian witness in this particular respect: his “message” was essentially inseparable from his person. Though his words themselves are already quite powerful, those who knew the man, and who are thus able to see the extraordinary radiance of his personality and the testimony of his life shine through the words, experience them in an especially profound way. For those who were not blessed with an encounter with the “Monsignor of the Sad Countenance” (a description Graham Greene gives to his eponymous character in Monsignor Quixote, a book Albacete said that, for some reason, people regularly gave him as a gift), the biographical accounts provide a helpful context from which to read the beautiful reflections in between.

Lorenzo Albacete was both a great-bodied and a great-souled man. His presence was huge. His wicked sense of humor was legendary, but he could pass from an outrageously funny comment immediately to an observation of world-stopping gravity, as serious as life itself. His sense of the dramatic was impeccable. It may be that his own life circumstances gave him a deep insight into tragedy: his father had died when he was a teenager, his mother, whose subsequent emotional collapse left Lorenzo the burden of caring for the family, developed Alzheimer’s and lived for many years first in confusion and then in complete silence; and his sole sibling, his younger brother, Manuel, was incapacitated by a psychological disorder that made it virtually impossible for him in later years to leave his apartment. Lorenzo was a man whose gifts could have elevated into the upper echelons of leadership in the Church, but such a role was just not compatible with the responsibility he endured of remaining constantly on call when his brother suffered panic attacks, and his nearly daily visits to his mother in the hospital.

As John Touhey explains in the biography that concludes the book, the text was adapted by companions of Albacete from recordings that were made of lectures he had given to the caregivers at Providence Hospital, where his mother once stayed, in Washington, D.C., in the 1990s. The basic theme of the book is the great mystery of suffering, which Albacete attempts to explore in a manner that preserves the mystery at its heart. This is not an abstract discourse composed from the distance of an author working at his desk in solitude, but the fruit of words spoken on the theme of suffering precisely in the midst of suffering, to those whom we can presume had more than a merely intellectual interest because they had made the alleviation of suffering their life’s work.

To say that the book is not an abstract treatise, however, is not to say that it is a merely emotional outburst, or an indulgence in the outrage of victimhood. Albacete in fact makes an argument in these pages, the essence of which we might summarize as follows: Suffering is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived—ultimately one to be “co-suffered.” The perception of suffering in another person presents us with a dramatic decision: do we offer an always rather facile explanation of why the person is suffering, and thus trivialize it? Do we allow ourselves to be repulsed by it, and thus seek in whatever way possible to eliminate it, even if this implies in the end the elimination of the one suffering? Or do we endure it with the other who suffers, and thus in some way share the burden? “To co-suffer,” Albacete proposes with a startling boldness, “is to be willing to serve on the jury in the trial of God and to risk our own faith by identifying with those who suffer in their questioning of God” (5).

This suffering and co-suffering, Albacete contends, open a person up in a profound way to the transcendent. Indeed, the more deeply one enters with patience and compassion (both words have “to suffer” as the root: patior) into the aporia of suffering and experiences the affront to justice, to goodness, to human dignity, it implies, the more radically one makes oneself vulnerable to an encounter with God—specifically, with the God who has redeemed us not by delivering an explanation from heaven but by entering even more radically than we are capable into our suffering condition. “The redemption of suffering,” he argues, “. . . cannot be found as an ‘ultimate answer’ to a problem: it can only be an event that transforms the drama of suffering into a drama of love and shows love to be more powerful than its denial” (19). Albacete comes back repeatedly in these pages to the example of Job, who endured tribulations in the most extreme form, neither passively nor cynically, and was rewarded in the end, not with an explanation, but with an immediate encounter with God, an encounter virtually unique in the Old Testament.

The book has six chapters. The first simply, perhaps unexpectedly, takes the side of those who feel the injustice of suffering, especially the suffering of the innocent, experiencing it so profoundly they are led to deny God—or at least accuse him. In the second chapter, drawing on a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose daughter, a Catholic nun, founded a home for the care of those with incurable disease, Albacete explains that there is a connection between the inability to co-suffer and what is ironically the inclination to destroy those who suffer. Chapters three and four distinguish the deepest kind of suffering—namely, the spiritual suffering that dissolves personal identity—from mere pain, and present the solidarity of accepting suffering in oneself and others as mediating a grace that restores personal identity, even in the midst of trials. It is interesting that Albacete discusses the “mystery of the cross” only in chapter five; he thus does not appeal to it in a cheap fashion, which might trivialize the experience of suffering, but enters into this mystery with a due reverence, recognizing that it is in fact the deepest truth underlying everything else he has said. In the final chapter, Albacete unveils the extraordinary insight that the deepest co-suffering is a co-suffering with Christ himself, an unexpected gift that lies at the heart of Christian existence.

In addition to the rich meditations it offers, another worthwhile feature of the book is its illuminating references to the great saints and novelists, with whom Albacete evidently felt a deep affinity: above all Padre Pio, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and Georges Bernanos. If there is anything to be disappointed about in these pages, it is only that we do not find any of the notorious “Msgr. Albacete Stories”—anecdotes about his little adventures and genial quips. But one hopes that someone has collected these and that they might someday appear in a little collection, which would offer spiritual nourishment of a different sort. In the meantime, it is a joy to know that those who were unable to meet the man in person have yet another book in which they can get to know something of the inner life of this unforgettable illustration of the infinite originality of Christian existence.