List of points

When I speak to you about “apostolate of friendship”, I mean a personal friendship, self-sacrificing and sincere: face to face, heart to heart.

In the apostolate of friendship and trust, the first step has to be understanding, service — and holy intransigence in doctrine.

Those who have met Christ cannot shut themselves in their own little world: how sad such a limitation would be! They must open out like a fan in order to reach all souls. Each one has to create — and widen — a circle of friends, whom he can influence with his professional prestige, with his behaviour, with his friendship, so that Christ may exercise his influence by means of that professional prestige, that behaviour, that friendship.

I understand perfectly when you write to me about your apostolate: “I am going to pray for three hours, studying Physics. It will be a bombardment so that another position, which is on the other side of the library table, falls — you have met him already when he came round here.”

I remember how happy you were when you heard me say that prayer and work can easily go together.

We read in the Scriptures: Stultorum infinitus est numerus, the number of fools is infinite, and they seem to grow more every day. In all sorts of places, in the most unexpected situations, under the mantle of high office and respected positions — and even in the guise of “virtue”— you will have to put up with so much forgetfulness and so little good judgement.

But I do not understand how you can lose the supernatural view of life and give up caring. There is nothing you can do but put up with these situations, though your interior dispositions must be very poor if you put up with them for human motives.

If you do not help these people to find the right way by doing your work responsibly and finishing it well — by sanctifying it! — you will become like them, a fool. Either that or an accomplice.

You understood the meaning of friendship when you began to feel that you were like the shepherd of a little flock which you had left abandoned, but were now trying to gather together again, taking it upon yourself to serve each one of them.

You cannot just be passive. You have to become a real friend of your friends — by helping them. First, with the example of your behaviour and then with your advice and with the influence that a close friendship provides.

You have had the good fortune to find real teachers, authentic friends, who have taught you everything you wanted to know without holding back. You have had no need to employ any tricks to steal their knowledge, because they led you along the easiest path, even though it had cost them a lot of hard work and suffering to discover it… Now, it is your turn to do the same, with one person, and another — with everyone!

Meditate on this carefully and act accordingly: people who think you are unpleasant will stop thinking that when they realise that you really love them. It is up to you.

Through your friendship and doctrine — or rather, through charity and the message of Christ — you will move many non-Catholics to help in earnest and to do good to all men.

Believe me, the apostolate of giving doctrine usually has to be, as it were, capillary, spreading from one to another, from each believer to his immediate companion.

The children of God care about all souls, because every soul is important.