“The orthodox teaching of the catholic faith is that God is Essense and that in order for evil to be from Him, evil would be His nature”
“But they are locked in by their denial that love is freedom, that only free love is true love and that forced love is no-love, indeed un-love, and by extension un-God.”
“that the origin of evil began with a free-will rebellion against God by Satan and his fellow angels.”
That’s all well and good but if God created the cosmos and everything in it to operate with a uniformity of cause and effect how then can He have created absolute “free-will” with the potential for rebellion without creating the concept rebellion? Are you saying that a creature can create a concept not known or thought of by God or that God learned something because of the creature’s exercise of “free-will”?
God is the source of everything and all, and that includes our freedom; He gave it. Freedom and free will are not independent of the rest of the creation, as you observe correctly, and therefore free will cannot be independent of consequences.
One of the potential consequences of free will is rebellion, resisting authority. Free press is free to lie as well as to print truth. My freedom doe snot eixst at the expense of your freedom.
Love must be free to be returned. God could have made us all "love" Him, but that would be false love. In order for love to be genuine it must be free and it must be freely returned.
Once you take away man's freedom of will, you have a slave who either doesn't know he is a slave or who has no choice but to be a slave.
The Church teaches that the angels rebelled and so did our human ancestors because God gave both the freedom to come to Him or to rebel. Just because you have a blessing in your hand doesn't mean you have to waste it. But some do.
Two things help me thread my way between the Scylla of thinking that God is NOT "too pure to behold evil" and the Charybdis of His having so say, "Oh,Wow! I didn't think THAT would happen, what do I do now!"
The first is the Augustinian (so I am told) idea that evil, as such, does not exist. It is a, rather, "privation of good". This ties in with Stfassissi's fine excerpting from St. Thomas and expecially his saying that nothing can be entirely evil because "being" is a good.
The second is the concept of eternity and the thought experiment of trying to look at things from God's point of view (yeah, right).
In the Exsultet, sung at the Easter Vigil, is the verse::
O happy fault, O necessary sin of Adam,
which gained for us so great a Redeemer!
Man's rebellion is evil now, in time, before the consummation. But "when we've been dead ten thousand years," it will be seen as glorious.
These are just sort of suggested interpretive tools and not offered as conclusive of anything.