List of points

Naturalness. Let your lives as christian men, as christian women — your salt and your light — flow spontaneously, without anything odd or silly: always carry with you our spirit of simplicity.

May your dedication pass unnoticed as, for thirty years, did that of Jesus.

Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus visit Jesus privately when things are normal and also in the hour of triumph.

But they are courageous in the face of authority, declaring their love for Christ audacter, boldly, in the hour of cowardice. Learn from them.

'Non manifeste, sed quasi in occulto, quite privately, without drawing attention to himself': So Jesus goes up to the feast of Tabernacles. So will he go, on the way to Emmaus, with Cleophas and his companion. So is he seen, after his Resurrection, by Mary Magdalen.

And so will he appear — 'the disciples did not realise that it was Jesus' — at the miraculous catch of fishes, as Saint John tells us.

And more hidden still, through Love for men, is he in the Host.

You want to be a martyr. I will place a martyrdom within your reach: to be an apostle and not to call yourself an apostle, to be a missionary — with a mission — and not to call yourself a missionary, to be a man of God and to seem a man of the world: to pass unnoticed!

Be men and women of the world, but don't be worldly men and women.

Get rid of that 'self-satisfied air' which isolates your soul from the souls that approach you. Listen to them. And speak with simplicity; only thus will your work as an apostle grow in extent and fruitfulness.