Since 1954 until her death in 2004 she received visits from souls in purgatory to explain to her their sufferings and their need for prayers.
Maria Simma united her sufferings with Jesus and placed them in the hands of the Blessed Mother, who she said 'knows best who needs our prayers and offerings of sufferings.'
According to Robin Ryan, an associate professor of systematic theology at Catholic Theological Union and a Passionist priest, the presence of suffering is the one thing that most challenges our faith.
Even if a person lives in a mansion and has a great job, suffering touches everybody and affects everybody's faith."
We may have to refer back, again and again, to the statement of a sage and a saint: "
suffering gives savour to our life".
According to Muslim scholars, the sufferings of Mohammad and his successors, especially Hussein's disasters in Karbala, (24) display communal, intelligible, and emotional dimensions and, therefore, represent an archetypal example of eschatological suffering.
The sufferings of Mohammad and Hussein were also highly emotional.
With the second interpretation of the phrase "He loved them to the end," however, an inextricable link between
suffering and love is expressed, almost like a mountain and a valley, such that if the
suffering were to vanish, so necessarily would the love--perhaps not all of the love, but a certain intensity and fullness of it would be lost.
The third period began in 1966 when the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution exploded and all Christians went through a baptism of
suffering and humiliation.
It is not difficult to find
suffering. You don't have to look far because it is all around us - earthquakes, floods, wars, terrorism, pestilence, ill health.
Keywords: mediated
suffering, recognition, hostile media effect, witnessing, empathy, media coverage in conflict, moral concern, protracted conflict, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, public opinion
Peacocke's proposal of the creative
suffering of the triune God in terms of female procreativity has intriguing possibilities for theological reflection and discourse.