List of points

Any job, no matter how hidden, no matter how insignificant, when offered to the Lord, is charged with the strength of God’s life!

We will dedicate all the exertions of our life, great and small, to the honour of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

—I am moved when I recall the work of those brilliant professionals — two engineers and two architects — cheerfully moving furniture into a student residence. When they had put a blackboard into a classroom, the first thing those four artists wrote was: Deo omnis gloria! — all the glory to God.

—Jesus, I know that this pleased you greatly.

We are under an obligation to work, and to work conscientiously, with a sense of responsibility, with love and perseverance, without any shirking or frivolity. Because work is a command from God, and God is to be obeyed, as the Psalmist says, in laetitia, joyfully!

If we really want to sanctify our work, we have inescapably to fulfil the first condition: that of working — and working well! — with human and supernatural seriousness.

That half-finished work is a caricature of the holocaust, the total offering God is asking of you.

The Lord wants his children, those of us who have received the gift of faith, to proclaim the original optimistic view of creation, the love for the world which is at the heart of Christianity .

—So there should always be enthusiasm in your professional work, and in your effort to build up the earthly city.

You must be careful: don’t let your professional success or failure — which will certainly come — make you forget, even for a moment, what the true aim of your work is: the glory of God!

Christian responsibility in work cannot be limited to just putting in the hours. It means doing the task with technical and professional competence… and, above all, with love of God.

Through your professional work, which you bring to completion with all the human and supernatural perfection possible, you can — and should! — give Christian standards in the places where you carry out your profession or job.

You have to work with such supernatural vision that you let yourself be absorbed by your activity only in order to make it divine. In this way the earthly becomes divine, the temporal eternal.

The interior struggle doesn’t take us away from our temporal business — it makes us finish it off better!

Through your Christian doctrine, your upright life and your work well done, you have to give good example to the people around you — relatives, friends, colleagues, neighbours, pupils — in the way you carry out your profession and fulfil the duties your job entails. You cannot be a shoddy worker.