“External penance includes particularly the acceptance from God in a spirit of resignation and trust of all life’s sorrows and hardships and of everything that involves inconvenience and annoyance in the conscientious performance of the obligations of our daily life and work and the practice of Christian virtue. Penance of this kind is in fact inescapable. Yet it serves not only to win God’s mercy and forgiveness for our sins… but also sweetens, one might almost say, the bitterness of this mortal life of ours with the promise of its heavenly reward. For ‘the sufferings of the present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory to come that will be revealed in us.'”
~Pope John the XXIII in his Encyclical Paenitentiam Agere
Fish Fry Chronicles 