"It Hurts" is not an Argument

"I guess I just want to remind them that people every single day embrace varying kinds of sacrifice—slow or fast, honored or humiliating—and if you want anything resembling a functioning culture (let alone a Catholic one) you need people who can say that ‘it hurts’ isn’t an argument. Every functioning culture relies on a core of people who can accept that life, or God, or whatever they believe in, will ask them to do things they would never have believed possible; and they do them. Every day. Policemen and policemen’s wives; soldiers and soldiers’ husbands; saints and martyrs; pregnant women in desperate circumstances; everyone who suffers and whose suffering would be eased by just a little wrong action, just a small palliative sin."
-Eve Tushnet