Forgotten Truths To Set Faith Afire!

 

 

"The greatest tragedy in the world, Cardinal Cushing once said, was not pain, but wasting pain.   We all suffer, everyone of us, the youngest to oldest.   We suffer loneliness, cancer, the loss of a wife, a husband, a child; we suffer misunderstandings, family conflicts, ruptured friendships, cosmetic disfigurement, mental, emotional, physical incapacities.   We suffer a sense of utter powerlessness, an empty feeling of futility.   The world is awash in pain.   How tragic if that pain is wasted; that pain can be united with the suffering of Christ on the cross to achieve enormous good.   The Cardinal knew that Christ did not make possible the salvation of the world through his teaching, his preaching, his miracles, but by his suffering and death on the cross.  When He appeared to be utterly powerless, He was radiating the greatest power unleashed in the world.  When He was crying out, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?”  He was fil...

 

"The wood of the Cross became the vehicle for our redemption, just as the tree from which it was fashioned had occasioned the fall of our first parents. Suffering and death, which had been a consequence of sin, were to become the very means by which sin was vanquished. The Innocent Lamb was slain on the altar of the Cross, and yet from the immolation of the victim new life burst forth:  the power of evil was destroyed by the power of self-sacrificing love. The Cross, then, is something far greater and more mysterious than it first appears.  It is indeed an instrument of torture, suffering and defeat, but at the same time it expresses the complete transformation, the definitive reversal of these evils, that is what makes it the most eloquent symbol of hope that the world has ever seen.  It speaks to all who suffer – the oppressed, the sick, the poor, the outcast, the victims of violence – and offers them hope that God can transform their suffering int...