List of points

I don't like your euphemistic habit of calling cowardice prudence.

For, as a result, God's enemies, with minds empty of ideas, will take advantage of your 'prudence' to acquire the name of learning and so reach positions that they never should attain.

'And in a paganised or pagan environment when my life clashes with its surroundings, won't my naturalness seem artificial?' you ask me.

And I reply: Undoubtedly your life will clash with theirs; and that contrast — faith confirmed by works! — is exactly the naturalness I ask of you.

The standard of holiness that God asks of us is determined by these three points:

Holy intransigence, holy coercion and holy shamelessness.

Holy shamelessness is one thing: plain cheekiness, quite another.

Holy shamelessness is a characteristic of the 'life of childhood.' A little child worries about nothing. He makes no effort to hide his weaknesses, his natural miseries, not even when everyone is watching him.

This shamelessness applied to the supernatural life, brings with it the following train of thought: praise, contempt; esteem, ridicule; honour, dishonour; health, sickness; riches, poverty; beauty, ugliness…

All right… so what?

Laugh at ridicule. Despise the bogey of what people will say. See and feel God in yourself and in your surroundings. And you will acquire the holy shamelessness that you need — what a paradox! — in order to live with the refinement of a christian gentleman.

What conversations! What vulgarity and what dirt! And you have to associate with them, in the office, in the university, in the operating-theatre…, in the world.

Ask them if they wouldn't mind stopping, and they laugh at you. Look annoyed, and they get worse. Leave them, and they continue.

This is the solution: first pray for them, and offer up some sacrifice; then face them like a man and make use of the 'strong language apostolate'. — The next time we meet I'll tell you — in a whisper — a few useful words.

When I call you 'good child' don't think I imagine you timid or bashful. If you are not manly and normal, instead of being an apostle you will be a caricature that causes laughter.

Woman is stronger than man, and more faithful, in the hour of suffering: Mary of Magdala and Mary Cleophas and Salome!

With a group of valiant women like these, closely united to our Lady of Sorrows, what work for souls could be done in the world!