When a Child Asks the Pope Why Bad Things Happen: Suffering, Faith, and the Beginning of Resilience

When a Child Asks the Pope Why Bad Things Happen

A six-year-old boy named Renzo stood before the pope and asked the question philosophers, theologians, and psychologists have wrestled with across centuries.

"Why do bad things happen to some people? And not to others? Whose fault is it? Why are there so many people living on the street? No one sees them; no one helps them."

Renzo is Peruvian. His family fled extreme poverty and resettled in Barcelona's Raval neighborhood, a dense district where more than half the population is of migrant origin. The family receives support from a soup kitchen run by the Missionaries of Charity and the Mano Amiga Foundation. It was there, on June 10, that Pope Leo XIV visited the community before celebrating Mass at the Sagrada Familia — a deliberate choice, the pontiff said, to touch human suffering rather than simply admire ecclesiastical architecture.

The question Renzo asked is not a child's misunderstanding of the world. It is a child's precise understanding of it.

Presence Before Explanation

Pope Leo XIV did not deflect the question. He acknowledged its difficulty directly before anchoring his response in the life of Christ: "God's word tells us that Our Lord 'went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed,' and yet we know he was crucified. But the story did not end there, for he rose again on the third day, conquering both evil and death."

The structure of that answer is significant. It does not promise the removal of suffering. It insists on the transformation of suffering — and it offers the person in pain something more durable than a solution: presence.

"Through the life of Jesus Christ, God shows us that, even amid suffering, he never abandons any of his children. Let us have confidence; Jesus is with us, helping and accompanying us, and giving us the strength to navigate the difficult moments we may encounter in life."

This is the core argument: presence, not explanation, is the foundation of resilience.

What the Research Confirms

The psychological literature on resilience consistently identifies meaning-making as a core protective factor. For children specifically, situating personal suffering within a larger framework — familial, communal, or transcendent — is associated with reduced anxiety and stronger long-term adaptive functioning. A 2021 analysis in the Journal of Child and Family Studies found that children in economically precarious households who reported a sense of spiritual or religious coherence showed measurably higher scores on resilience inventories.

Research on adverse childhood experiences also shows that the presence of even one trusted adult who responds to a child's distress with genuine attentiveness significantly alters developmental trajectories. The pope, in that moment at St. Augustine's former convent, was functioning as what developmental psychologists call a "relational anchor."

The willingness to sit with the difficulty of Renzo's question before answering it models something therapists and pastoral workers recognize as foundational: the therapeutic value of acknowledgment before intervention.

The Beginning of Resilience

Renzo's question will not be answered definitively in his lifetime, or in anyone else's. Suffering is not a puzzle with a solution — it is a condition of human existence that requires, again and again, a living response.

What the encounter in Barcelona demonstrates is that the resources within the Catholic tradition for meeting that condition are remarkably aligned with what contemporary research identifies as protective and healing: meaning-making narratives, genuine presence, and the capacity to hold pain without being destroyed by it.

Renzo asked the pope why bad things happen. The pope pointed him toward a story in which suffering is real, accompaniment is certain, and the final word belongs to resurrection. That answer will not appear in a clinical manual. But it is, by every measure that matters, the beginning of resilience.

Source: EWTN News, June 10, 2026. Reporting by the Vatican Bureau.