Do you know anyone who has chosen to be a Victim Soul?

I’m not sure if one of my family members made the offer but I do know that after the family member was diagnosed with bone cancer (from what I understand a very painful kind of cancer) that they did offer their sufferings and refused any morphine or pain meds for the holy souls in purgatory.

meanwhile I moan about a lot less things

 

I don't have the necessary strength to follow the vocation of a victim soul, but I've asked myself if this was the only path to the conversion of some of my family members who seem to reject any call that comes from the gospel, any word, and any testimony that is based on the tradition of the Church and the lives of the saints.

 

A holy matriarch. How marvelous!

 

I can't exactly say my Mom was a victim soul. When Christine Soule married my Dad, John, in 1948, she was still Protestant. Bishop Fulton Sheen had a profound impact on her and she converted shortly before my middle brother, Tim, was born in January, 1953. She developed a love for the Rosary and shared with me (before my radical conversion) that she thought Our Lady's Triumph would come in the 2020s. She had several physical ailments for which doctors refused to consider surgery, due to Mom's frailty. After my family moved from Syracuse to Pulaski in 2000, some of my Mom's memorabilia was sent to us when the Soule homestead in PA was sold. In it was a letter my Mom had written to my Grandma Lulu Soule in 1931. My Mom tried to comfort her Mom, sharing that she had stayed up all night praying.

I guess Christine was always a prayer warrior!.

 

What a grace that she was your Mom.

 

She suffered more than she had to. It was her doctor after she died that told us this. I don’t believe she asked to get cancer. But her sadness may have brought the illness.