Hello and welcome to focus the Catholic Answers podcast for living, understanding and defending

your Catholic faith. One of the greatest challenges faced with any person who wants to explain and defend the Catholic faith is life and the fact that life involves sometimes overwhelming suffering.

So you got to be able to answer the suffering question

for many people.

For many people, it is the obstacle

that keeps them from accepting the church's proposition. Even for the person of very deep faith,

suffering can devastate the sense of meaning, the confidence that life makes

sense and both of those things we need for our faith life. So we're often asked, excuse me, left asking how God, this God who loves us and made us could allow all of this. And because suffering often involves that personal crisis, it asks a great deal of us in responding to it.

So what does every Catholic need to know about suffering?

Here to help us answer that question is Dr Mark Gieschek.

He's a professor of Sacred Scripture at the Augustine Institute in the Graduate School of

Theology. His books include The Wisdom of Solomon and Light on the Dark Passages of Scripture.

He writes regularly on his blog, Catholic Bible student.com and the name of his newest book is suffering.

What Every Catholics Should Know in the What Every Catholic

should Know series from Augustine Institute and Ignatious Press.

Dr Gieschek, thank you very much for being here with us.

It's really fun to be here with you, sigh.

Well, congratulations on the new book.

They said, let's take the most difficult topic in the whole series and give it to Dr.

Gieschak apparently, because this is a tough one.

What to make of suffering?

Well, they probably gave me the most difficult topic because I have the most difficult last

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