The Happiness God Wants for Us

How Catholic faith unites joy, suffering and the promise of Heaven

Our modern secular culture often dismisses Christianity as a system of rigid rules and controls which is restrictive or at least wary of happiness, as though God’s will were fundamentally at odds with human fulfilment. The language of sacrifice, self-denial and the Cross can easily be misread as evidence that faith asks us to endure life rather than to flourish within it.

Catholic teaching, however, has always claimed the opposite. It insists that the desire for happiness is not a temptation to be suppressed but a sign of what we are made for.

St Josemaría Escrivá expressed this with characteristic clarity when he said that what we seek is not momentary happiness, but one that is deep and lasting and both human and supernatural. He was not speaking to monks withdrawn from the world but to people exhausted by work, family responsibilities, disappointment and ambition. His insistence was radical in its simplicity. God does not ask us to flee ordinary life in order to find Him. He asks us to discover Him there. Work, friendship, love, creativity and rest belong to God’s plan. Grace does not crush these desires but purifies and elevates them. To want happiness is not a failure of faith but evidence that the heart remembers what it was made for.