QUOTATION: Evil

Pain and sadness are not the greatest evil; worse is judging evil to be good and not rejecting it.

-- St. Thomas Aquinas

QUOTATION: Transcendence is the Answer

The key is to understand the cross as the seed of resurrection. Any attempt to cope with pain will bring partial results, if it is not based in transcendence.

--Pope Francis, Pope Francis: His Life in His Own Words

QUOTATION: Wasted Pain

One of the greatest tragedies in the world is wasted pain. Pain without relation to the cross is like an unsigned check - without value. But once we have it countersigned with the Signature of the Saviour on the Cross, it takes on an infinite value.

--Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, About Crosses

QUOTATION: Grace Hurts

This notion that grace is healing omits the fact that before it heals, it cuts with the sword Christ said He came to bring.

--Flannery O'Connor

QUOTATION: Pain

Bodily pain affects man as a whole down to the deepest layers of his moral being. It forces him to face again the fundamental questions of his fate, of his attitude toward God and fellow man, of his individual and collective responsibility and of the sense of his pilgrimage on earth.

--Pope Pius XII

QUOTATION: Hurt

You must expect that these poor sinners in the Church are going to get hurt and that they are going to hurt each other. To be let down by the Church is not a reason to leave her, any more than to be let down by your family is a reason to give up family life and move to a desert island. Are there any who have not been hurt by members of their family? In his ‘City of God’, St. Augustine wisely observed that it breaks the heart of any good person to see that even in one’s own home one is not in a safe place and that one may be attacked even there by an enemy posing as a friend or even by an enemy who used to be a loved one. If we all gave up on the human race because we have been hurt, we’d have to move to separate planets.

--Fr. Benedict Groeschel, C.F.R. - “Arise from Darkness”

QUOTATION: Bearing One's Cross

I know not if bearing the cross can be called "pain", for to my mind it is to repose on a bed of down and roses.

--St. John of Avila, Letters, X

QUOTATION: Speaking of One's Pain

Speaking about our own pain is seldom helpful for someone who is in pain.

--Henri Nouwen

QUOTATION: Pain

Pain in itself is not unbearable; it is the failure to understand its meaning that is unbearable.

--Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

QUOTATION: Pain

No doubt Pain as God’s megaphone is a terrible instrument; it may lead to final and unrepented rebellion. But it gives the only opportunity the bad man can have for amendment. It removes the veil; it plants the flag of truth within the fortress of a rebel soul.

--C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain