Can God deliberately bring a good through a moral evil, according to Catholicism?

Question

The Catechism says:

God is in no way, directly or indirectly, the cause of moral evil. He permits it, however, because he respects the freedom of his creatures and, mysteriously, knows how to derive good from it: For almighty God... because he is supremely good, would never allow any evil whatsoever to exist in his works if he were not so all-powerful and good as to cause good to emerge from evil itself.

CCC 311

In time we can discover that God in his almighty providence can bring a good from the consequences of an evil, even a moral evil, caused by his creatures...

CCC 312

But the principle of double effect teaches that it is not permissible to take a good through a bad effect. So how can God be allowed to deliberately take a good through an evil?

Answer 1

The question "how can God be allowed to deliberately take a good through an evil?" appears to muddy the waters. It is one thing to bring a good out of another's evil act, and another to commit an evil act yourself for the sake of a good end.

For instance, imagine you are an undercover officer, and you must stand by while a member of the criminal organization you have infiltrated murders an innocent person. You stand by so that later you might have the evidence required to bring the whole organization down and stop all future crime. The individual murder is a bad event, and you do have the power to stop it. But, you can bring about a greater good by permitting the evil to happen. It is not immoral to do so.

Contrast this with an officer who goes under cover, and, in the process of his undercover work must murder an innocent person. He is not permitted under double effect to commit a murder so that he may bring the eventual good of the toppling of the organization.

In the first example, the actions of the officer are morally neutral. He does not get involved in the murder. He is a bystander. In the second example, his actions are morally evil. he is murdering someone. This is the distinction we generally try to make with double effect. You can know an evil outcome, a murder, will result from your inaction. Or, in other cases, from your action, say, an innocent bystander might be caught up in cross fire when you go to war with a tyrant like Hitler. You cannot do an evil thing because you want to obtain a good end. EG, you cannot steal from honest, hardworking people who have a bit of excess to their wealth in order to give that wealth to people who need it (this doesn't mean social welfare is wrong; governments actually have a right and indeed a duty to levy reasonable taxes and to allocate funds to the common good, what I'm talking about here is Robinhood style vigilantism).

Once we have understood what double effect really says here, we can see that God's permitting evil is more like the first undercover officer. He does not commit evil acts Himself, but He will permit free willed humans to make evil decisions and to commit evil acts.

The Doctrine of Double Effect: SEP

Answer 2

Evil men by evil acts put Jesus to death. At the same time, Jesus, who had the power to resist their evil acts, permitted himself to be executed and die for the sins of humanity. This sacrifice - both voluntary and involuntary - is the cornerstone of all Christian doctrine.

So how can God be allowed to deliberately take a good through an evil? By allowing that evil to be done to his own person.

Whoever digs a pit will fall into it, and a stone will come back on him who starts it rolling. (Proverbs 26:27)

Proverbs contains many principles for living. The idea that God can cause the actions of evil people to rebound on them is a recurring theme in the Bible, such as with Haman in Esther, hung on the scaffolding he had erected for Moredecai.

When God acts openly and miraculously, mountains may fall and cities be leveled, but hearts will not change. For that you need faith in an unseen or seldom seen God. Thus God sometimes acts openly, more often acts through faithful believers, and most often acts in unseen ways. If the "good people" always have all the power in the world, then evil people will join them not out of faith but opportunism and self-preservation, and over time the church will fill up with false believers. Thus God acts by having the wicked turn on each other from time to time, so that the cause of their downfall is hidden. To produce faith, it is imperative that much good be accomplished by the unwilling and unwitting actions of the wicked.