List of points

Agreed: your concern ought to be for “them”. But your first concern must be yourself, your own interior life. Otherwise, you will not be able to serve them.

The foundation of all we do as citizens — as Catholic citizens — lies in an intense interior life. It lies in being really and truly men and women who turn their day into an uninterrupted conversation with God.

From the hidden life of Jesus you must draw this further consequence: not to be in a hurry… even when you are!

That is to say, first and foremost comes the interior life. Everything else, the apostolate, any apostolate, is a corollary.

If piety is lacking — the bond which ties us close to God and, for his sake, to others because we see Christ in them — disunity is inevitable, with the loss of all Christian spirit.

Without interior life, and without formation, there is no true apostolate and no work that is fruitful. Whatever work is done will be fragile, fictitious even.

—How great, then, is our responsibility as children of God! We have to hunger and thirst for him and for his doctrine.

Please don’t let yourself become bourgeois, for if you do, you will be a hindrance. You will become a dead weight for others in the apostolate and, above all, a source of suffering for the Heart of Christ.

You must not stop doing apostolate, nor abandon your effort to do your work as best you can, nor neglect your life of piety.

—God will do the rest.

We Catholics have to go through life being apostles, with God’s light and God’s salt. We should have no fear, and we should be quite natural; but with so deep an interior life and such close union with Our Lord that we may shine out, preserving ourselves from corruption and from darkness, and spread around us the fruits of serenity and the effectiveness of Christian doctrine.