April 8, 2025 // Diocese

‘The Only Answer to Suffering’ is Christ

Scott Warden

Editor-In-Chief

As Holy Week Nears, Local Doctor Shares Why Christ’s Wounds Matter Today

In January of 2021, Our Sunday Visitor published a book written by Dr. Thomas McGovern entitled, “What Christ Suffered: A Doctor’s Journey Through the Passion.” The book explores the torture and crucifixion of Jesus from a medical perspective, looking at the horrible realities of the unprecedented cruelty the Romans inflicted on Him.

On two consecutive Saturdays during Lent – March 29 and April 5 – McGovern, a dermatologist whose practice is based in Fort Wayne, gave a two-part presentation on the sufferings of Christ at his home parish, St. Peter Catholic Church in downtown Fort Wayne. Dozens of people filled the hall at St. Peter on both occasions to listen to McGovern present the findings from research that he has conducted and compiled throughout the past nearly 40 years and formed the basis of his book, which he has revised for a second edition that is expected to be published by OSV early next year.

McGovern grew up as the oldest of three children in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. His list of bona fides is too long to detail in this article, but they include graduating from medical school at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota and an eight-year stint serving as a doctor in the Army, which included two years of doing research on biological warfare and infectious diseases. He moved to Fort Wayne in January of 2000 to begin his dermatology practice, which focuses on facial reconstruction surgery for patients with skin cancer. He served on the board of the Catholic Medical Association and was the co-host of the popular radio show “Doctor, Doctor,” which was produced by Redeemer Radio in Fort Wayne.

During the second of his presentations at St. Peter, McGovern shared thoroughly researched details of Christ’s crucifixion, which stemmed from his own research and that of other experts. It was both fascinating and excruciating to hear. 

McGovern also told the story of Viktor Frankl, a neurologist and psychologist who survived the Holocaust during World War II. Frankl is the founder of logotherapy, a school of psychotherapy that purports that man’s principal motivation is the search for the meaning of life. McGovern relayed a story Frankl wrote about before his death in 1997. Frankl was treating a man whose wife had just died, and the man was distraught. Frankl asked him, “What would have happened if you had died first?” The man answered that his death would have caused his wife immeasurable grief. Frankl told him that with her passing, she avoided that terrible suffering, but at the price of his own. Simply put, his grief was the price he was paying to save his wife from her own agony. Through this experience, Frankl concluded that suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds meaning. “In other words,” McGovern said, “love transforms suffering into sacrifice.” This, he emphasized, is why it’s important to understand the depths of Christ’s suffering for us.

Following the second night of his presentation at St. Peter, McGovern spoke with Today’s Catholic about the research he’s conducted on the suffering of Christ, how he came to write a book on the subject, how this knowledge has influenced his own faith, and his advice to Catholics on how they can grow closer to God during Holy Week by meditating on the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ passion. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Today’s Catholic: What was the inspiration for “What Christ Suffered”? How long have you been researching and speaking on Christ’s passion and crucifixion?

Dr. Thomas McGovern: So, my first year of medical school in Rochester, Minnesota, I taught sixth-grade religious education on Monday nights at a parish, Resurrection Catholic Church. It was getting close to Lent, and I said, hey, wouldn’t it be neat if I could teach something about what Jesus suffered? This would have been in March of 1986. One of my classmates heard that I was looking for interesting information and said, “Oh, you should talk to our pathology instructor, Dr. [William] Edwards, and so I went to talk to him and said, “I heard you might have some information on what Jesus suffered when He was crucified.” And he said, “Come back the next day, and I’ll have something for you.” So, the next day, I said, “Did you remember?” He handed me an article on the physical death of Jesus Christ in the Journal of the American Medical Association, and it was dated for the following week. It hadn’t been published yet. … He was the author, and that’s the article I showed some clips from in the talk at St. Peter’s.

I ended up doing my junior year required research semester with him. He’s a cardiac pathologist. But during that time, he loaned me the information he used to write the paper, so I started giving talks and made them audio-visual. Back in the day, we had slides in carousels and found interesting pictures. So that’s where it started. I gave talks for about 20 years, and I kept reading. … I stopped giving talks about 20 years ago when I realized the information in the talks wasn’t jibing with the new information that I was reading.

Ten Years after that, somewhere around 2015, my friend Matthew Bunson challenged me to write a course for Catholic Distance University. So, I researched it some more, and I wrote a course for them. But then people would say, “Oh, Tom, you should write a book.” I said, “I’m not going to write a book unless a publisher asks me.” And then Jason Shanks, who was president of the OSV Institute at the time, did ask, and that’s how I came to write the book for OSV. It’s been a long evolution of studying the Crucifixion and the Passion.

Today’s Catholic: You mentioned that you’ve continued to read and study whatever new research comes out – and that your plan is to release a second edition of the book next year. What new research has surprised you about Christ’s suffering?

McGovern: Well, it depends on which realm you mean – intellectually, experientially, medically, or with the suffering?

With the medical, I think the findings have solidified, most likely, that Jesus would have been nailed through the heels. We can’t know for sure, but that’s the way it looks. You know, there’s one thing in crucifixion research that is hard to understand, but some people try to go, I think, too far with the evidence from the Shroud of Turin or the little evidence from people’s mystical visions about what really happened. And I trust most of those people who are careful or nuanced or say, “We really can’t know this.” So I’m trying to understand better how to glean what we can without going too far – like the question tonight when somebody asked what position Jesus’ fingers were in when He died. We really don’t know. I don’t think it really matters. … It’s like, look at what they did to Him! You’re missing the forest for the trees!

These types of things are why I’ve tried to integrate the understanding of suffering – including our suffering, not just His – because otherwise it can become sterile. 

Today’s Catholic: You’ve been researching, speaking, and writing about Christ’s suffering in His passion and crucifixion for almost 40 years. How has all of this head knowledge transferred to your heart and impacted your faith?

McGovern: That’s a great question. I would say until March of 2023, it had only impacted my head, and then two years ago, as part of my healing journey, I had an experience, which, like St. Thérèse of Lisieux, should remain secret. It was an experience where for the first time I knew without a doubt that God loved me. And it was experienced with a lot of healthy – what do they call it? – ugly crying, and I had several more experiences like that. That’s when it started to make sense. That was in March, and then it was mid-June to mid-August of 2023 when I had a two-month period of desolation. … It was only after this period of desolation when I could go to the cross and the crucifix and say, “Jesus, I believe you. Jesus, I trust you. Jesus, I love you.” And I felt as dry as dust inside. After I got out of that period, it was like, oh, I can’t do this anymore, and that was so valuable because I had no consolation behind it, no good feelings, nothing, but I was doing it because I knew God was there, and I knew He loved me. And so that’s when it was really brought home.

Today’s Catholic: We’re getting ready to enter into Holy Week, and it seems that, for many, it is the one week of the year where we’re forced to truly absorb ourselves in the suffering of Christ. The other 51 weeks, we’re thankful for it but not focused on it. What advice would you give to Catholics who want to understand Christ’s suffering better in order to get the most out of Holy Week?

McGovern: I would pick a Passion narrative in one of the Gospels and spend time in that narrative every day during Holy Week. Meditation is not prayer. Meditation is preparation for prayer. Meditation is action within our minds. Part of Ignatian spirituality is to place yourself somewhere in the scene and watch it unfold and then ask God to reveal what He wants them to see, to feel, in this scene. That’s what I would recommend.

Today’s Catholic: You mentioned earlier about not seeing the forest for the trees, but you’ve spent a lot of time and research exploring the trees for your book. What do you hope Catholics take away from your book – the first edition and, soon, the second edition? Why do the particulars of Christ’s suffering matter as it relates to the deepening of our faith?

McGovern: Because our religion is incarnational – it’s in the flesh. It happened at a certain place, at a certain time, and on a certain date. And what happened makes every difference for everything we do in our life. If Calvary didn’t happen, our lives would be different. We need to realize that in St. Paul’s letters, the cross is crucial – the word “crucial” comes from “cross.” The cross is essential to us Catholics. So, if we don’t know what happened there, how much can we possibly know about everything else? 

There’s an old line from a song … “to know him is to love him.” That’s true about Christ. And while it’s true for many reasons, one of them is because we all suffer, and the only answer to suffering is found in the person of Jesus, not in any intellectual answer. Unless we know Jesus, we cannot deal with our own suffering as effectively as He makes possible. 

Scott Warden is editor-in-chief of Today’s Catholic.