The French Catholic answer to a teething baby
Teething rings not doing the trick? A centuries-old French Catholic tradition offers parents another source of help.
about 1 month ago
The article titled “The French Catholic answer to a teething baby” was published on August 24 2026, but the provided excerpt contains no body text, so no substantive details can be extracted.
How does the Catholic Church address infant suffering?
Infant suffering is one of the most painful questions in Christian theology. The Catholic Church does not claim to possess a complete explanation for why a particular infant suffers. Instead, it responds through four convictions: God is not indifferent, Christ has entered human suffering, every child possesses inviolable dignity, and the Church must accompany and protect suffering children and their families.
Catholic teaching rejects the idea that an infant’s illness, disability, or death should automatically be interpreted as a personal punishment for the child or the parents. The Church recognizes that the existence of physical and moral evil is ultimately a mystery. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states:
“The fact that God permits physical and even moral evil is a mystery that God illuminates by his Son Jesus Christ who died and rose to vanquish evil.”
Faith does not provide a complete explanation for every tragedy in this life, but it affirms that God can bring good from evil—though the full way in which he does so may be known only in eternal life.
Pope Francis expressed this with particular candor when speaking to families of sick children. Asked why children suffer, he said that there are no easy answers and that this is “the mystery of the Cross.” He pointed to Christ crucified rather than offering a theoretical explanation: God’s answer is revealed first in the fact that the Son of God himself entered human pain and embraced death.
This means that Catholic faith permits lament, protest, and the question “Why?” Parents and others who suffer need not suppress their grief or pretend to understand it. John Paul II observed that human beings commonly enter suffering with a protest and a question addressed even to God and Christ.
The central Catholic response is not that suffering is good in itself. Disease, violence, congenital disorders, hunger, and death are evils, and the Christian should resist them. Rather, God can meet a person within suffering and transform it through Christ’s Cross and Resurrection.
John Paul II emphasizes that Christ does not ordinarily answer the question of suffering with an abstract explanation. Instead, Christ says, in effect, “Follow me”: enter into communion with him, who has suffered and redeemed humanity through the Cross. The meaning of suffering is therefore disclosed relationally—in union with Christ—rather than merely intellectually.
For an infant, this participation is not a conscious moral achievement. The Church should therefore speak carefully. It would be inappropriate to suggest that a baby is being asked to “learn a lesson” or that the child’s suffering is needed to improve the parents. The Christian claim is more profound and more modest: Christ is present with the child, receives the child’s suffering into his redeeming love, and can draw grace from a situation that remains genuinely tragic.
The International Theological Commission describes Christian suffering as capable of becoming participation in Christ’s redemptive suffering and intercession through Christ and the Church. This does not make the child’s pain desirable, nor does it remove the obligation to seek medical treatment and relief. It means that suffering, even when imposed without consent and without understanding, is not outside Christ’s saving presence.
The Church’s response begins with the child’s status as a human person. A child’s worth does not depend on health, cognitive ability, predicted lifespan, independence, or social usefulness.
The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith teaches that, beginning at conception, children affected by malformations or other pathologies are “little patients” whose lives are sacred, unique, unrepeatable, and inviolable—“exactly like that of every adult person.”
This principle has practical consequences:
The International Theological Commission also draws an analogy between infants who die violently and the Holy Innocents. Such children can be viewed in solidarity with those infants who suffered and died because of Christ, and with Christ’s own identification with “the least.” This is a theological source of hope and dignity, not a claim that violence itself is sacred or acceptable.
Catholic teaching rejects two opposite errors in caring for a terminally ill infant.
The child must not be killed by abortion, euthanasia, intentional suffocation, lethal medication, or another act aimed at causing death. The Church describes abortion as the deliberate killing of innocent human life and rejects selective prenatal practices based on disability as contrary to human dignity.
At the same time, Catholic morality does not require every possible medical intervention, regardless of burden or likelihood of benefit. The Church rejects “therapeutic obstinacy”—the unreasonable continuation of treatments that are futile, excessively burdensome, or disproportionate to the expected benefit.
Therefore, in a terminal condition, a treatment directed at curing the underlying disease may sometimes be withheld or discontinued when competent medical judgment concludes that it is no longer appropriate or only imposes further suffering. This is morally different from intending the child’s death. The intention is to stop an ineffective or disproportionate intervention while allowing the disease to follow its natural course.
What must never cease is care for the child as a person. The Holy See stresses that even when disease-directed therapy is stopped, integral care must continue—physical, psychological, emotional, relational, and spiritual. Palliative and comfort care may include pain relief, warmth, nourishment and hydration when appropriate, human presence, emotional support, and pastoral accompaniment.
For children with prenatal conditions expected to result in death before or shortly after birth, the Church recommends integrated perinatal comfort care rather than abandonment or a presumption that the pregnancy has no value.
Such care should unite:
The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith says that perinatal hospice centers can provide competent medical care, spiritual accompaniment, and the support of other families who have lived through similar pain. Caring for the child may help parents understand the experience not simply as a loss but also as part of a journey of love shared with their child.
This approach does not romanticize tragedy. It acknowledges that the child may die, while refusing to treat the child as disposable. It seeks not necessarily to add years to the child’s life, but to give life and love to the child’s remaining time.
Not all infant suffering is caused by unavoidable disease. Much results from neglect, poverty, war, exploitation, abuse, unsafe conditions, or adult irresponsibility. In those cases, the Catholic response must include moral action and social responsibility.
Pope Francis described the cry of hungry, sick, exploited, and abused children as a challenge to the entire world. He criticized the scandal that children suffer from easily curable diseases while food and medicine are wasted, and he condemned child slavery, child soldiers, and the arms trade that places weapons in children’s hands. He presented every child as a “diagnostic sign” of the moral health of families, communities, and nations.
The Church therefore addresses infant suffering through concrete works:
Pope Francis summarized the safeguarding responsibility with three verbs: protect, listen, and heal. Protection requires the involvement of the whole Christian community, prevention, formation, truth, and justice; no silence or concealment can be accepted concerning abuse. Pope Leo XIV likewise teaches that human dignity is a gift from God and does not depend on achievement or possessions; every person, including one marked by pain, reflects the Creator’s goodness.
The Church entrusts infants who die to the mercy of God. In particular, the question of infants who die without Baptism is treated with serious hope rather than despair. The cited International Theological Commission document does not present a simplistic formula, but points to reasons for hope rooted in God’s universal saving will, Christ’s solidarity with the vulnerable, and the analogy of the Holy Innocents.
For parents, this means that the Church’s pastoral posture should be one of prayer, trust, tenderness, and hope. The death of an infant is not treated as evidence that the child was rejected by God. The child remains known and loved by God, and the mystery of salvation is entrusted to divine mercy.
The Catholic Church addresses infant suffering by: