List of points

To have a Catholic spirit means that we should feel on our shoulders the weight of our concern for the entire Church — not just of this or that particular part of it. It means that our prayer should spread out north and south, east and west, in a generous act of petition.

So you will understand the cry — the aspiration — of that friend of ours, faced by the little love of so many people towards our Holy Mother: “I suffer for my Church!”

The work of the Church, each day, is a great fabric which we offer to God: because all of us who are baptised are the Church.

—If we carry out our tasks faithfully and selflessly, this great fabric will be beautiful and flawless. But if someone loosens a thread here, someone else a thread there, and another somewhere else… instead of a beautiful fabric we will have a tattered rag.

Don’t worry if your work seems barren just now. When it is holiness that is being sown, it is not lost: others will gather in the harvest.

In conversations I have had with so many married couples, I tell them often that while both they and their children are alive, they should help them to be saints, while being well aware that none of us will be a saint on earth. All we will do is struggle, struggle, struggle.

—And I also tell them: you Christian mothers and fathers are a great spiritual motor, sending the strength of God to your own ones, strength for that struggle, strength to win, strength to be saints. Don’t let them down!

Please say a prayer each day for the following intention: that all of us Catholics may be faithful and determined to struggle to be saints.

—It is so obviously reasonable. What else are we to desire for those we love, for those who are bound to us by the strong ties of the faith?

When you fulfil your duties in a cheerful and generous way you obtain abundant grace from God for other souls also.