EENS is so hard, I know I have to believe it .. this thread came at a weird moment.
A young (40ish) black man who is an acquaintance through friends had limited intellectual capacity and some delusional ideology suffered a life of rejection and abandonment with a crackhead mother, violent death of family members, homelessness and frequent imprisonment. Some of the prison was truly unwarranted. He was not a violent but a gentle person although somehow he managed to get into many fights. He said he believed in God but seemed unable to absorb more. He was nice despite all- I know that doesn't mean much. He died recently but I'm not sure how; maybe drugs.
I'm not writing this to trip anyone up or evilly play on people's heartstrings, and I must believe what the Church says. But I find it terribly hard to think God created this person just to suffer so here on earth (much through no fault of his own) and then for eternity in hell. I know God's Mercy is tempered with his Justice, but EENS has always been the most difficult for me to digest. In the natural, it is hard to see the justice. I have been told by my priest that it is useless to pray for the souls of non- Catholic deceased as well (EENS). I can understand why people are looking for loopholes around it. I feel terrible about this.
Here are a few ways to process this.
1) Had God given him full possession of his faculties, would he have rejected the faith and even become an enemy of it, so that he would have deserved a much worse eternal fate?
2) One of the dogmatic EENS definitions also states that he degrees of suffering in hell vary. It's not as if a selfless Jєωιѕн grandmother who gave her life for her children is going to be suffering the exact same fate as mass murderer Joe Stalin. I believe that there are some people in hell who suffer very little given that their natural virtues may offset some of their natural vices.
3) Given that it's possible this man you speak of wasn't capable of making true moral decisions, he may even be in a state of natural happiness like Limbo (given the impairment of his faculties). Had God NOT impaired his faculties, perhaps he would have sinned a great deal more. I believe that there are some people in Hell who suffer no more than someone might in this life.
4) God gives EVERYONE what they want. We see it even in this life. Some people enjoy going to church and praying, while others prefer to got to raucous debauched parties and find prayer abhorrent. God will give them what they want. Their suffering in the afterlife will consist of the fact that what they have chosen doesn't give them true happiness.
5) the Beatific Vision is not something owed to anyone and is not essential to perfect human happiness. That is why the infants (and other people without the use of reason) are perfectly happy in Limbo, happier than they could ever be in this life. So apart from this Beatific Vision, everyone receives everything that they want and seek and ask for. There was a saint who also asked God why He sent people to Hell. So God asked her to pick a soul in Hell to release from there. He took the designated soul and put him in Heaven (minus the Beatific Vision I imagine). That soul simply couldn't take it (kindof like how some people now hate going to church). He asked out. Then the saint asked God to at least put him in Purgatory. So He did. Then the soul complained that he didn't like that either, and asked to be returned to Hell. People go where they WANT to go.
At the end of the day, God has more love and compassion than we could ever dream of. So if you are grieved by the loss of a soul, He is that much more grieved (accidentally speaking of course).
We believe God is love and desires the salvation of all, but there's this thing about free will here, where everyone decides what he wants.
So this person you speak of, trust that God gave Him every possible mercy and that things were arranged so that he would have the least possible suffering in eternity given his free will. As I said, born into different circuмstances, he may have openly rejected the faith, become an enemy of it, and been a monumental sinner, whereas in his state of impairment he likely sinned a lot less than he otherwise would have.