The core of faith

Newsweek magazine, of all places, is where you can find this article on the Pope and redemptive suffering.

. . . suffering, scholars point out, is at the very core of the faith; it is the vital link between the human experience and that of Christ as savior. He was a suffering victim who seemed to have been defeated by the earthly powers of his time. But in his moment of apparent weakness and defeat, Christians see him as triumphant, dying for humanity's sins and opening the way to heaven . . . As Job understood, as Isaiah preached in the Old Testament, and as Christ taught in the Gospels and in his life, suffering is merely part of the human condition—and can best be answered with love. "Suffering seems to belong to man's transcendence," wrote John Paul. "It is one of those points in which man is in a certain sense 'destined' to go beyond himself."