What is that strange passion known only among Catholics as a wholesome and recognized instinct, by which men and women, even boys and girls – in the very height of vitality and strength – think that the one thing worth doing is to immure themselves in a cell, in order to suffer? What is the instinct that makes the Carmelite hang an empty cross in her cell, to remind herself that she must take the place of the absent figure upon it – and yet keeps the Carmelite the most radiantly happy of all women. The joy of a woman – I might say the gaiety of a woman – over her first child is but a shadow of the solemn joy of a Carmelite, the irrepressible gaiety of a Poor Clare – women, that is, who have sacrificed every single thing that the world thinks worth having…

The thing is simply inexplicable except on one hypothesis – that that unique thirst of Jesus upon the cross is communicated to his members, that his ambition to suffer is perpetuated continually in that Mystical Body in which he reenacts the history of his Passion – that these are the cells of that Body, which, like his hands and feet, are more especially pierced by nails, and who rejoice to know that they are called to this august vocation, by which the redemption wrought on Calvary is perpetually reenacted on earth; who “fill up what is lacking of the sufferings of Christ,” who are lambs of God whose blood mingles with the Blood on Calvary, victims whose sacrifice is accepted as united with his. This conception of the Church as the Body of Christ is surely the one hypothesis which makes the sufferings of individuals tolerable to contemplate.

Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson (+ 1914) was a British convert to Catholicism who is best known for his novels about the faith.