List of points

If your selfishness leads you away from the ordinary desire for the holy and healthy well-being of mankind, if you count the cost or if you are not moved by the wretched material or moral condition of your neighbour, you force me to reproach you strongly, so that you can do something about it. If you do not feel a holy fraternity with your fellow men, and you live on the margin of the great Christian family, you are just a pitiful waif.

The Apostle also wrote that “there is no more Gentile and Jew, no more circumcised and uncircumcised; no one is barbarian or Scythian, no one is a slave or a free man; there is nothing but Christ in any of us.”

Those words are as valid today as they were then. Before the Lord there is no difference of nation, race, class, state… Each one of us has been born in Christ to be a new creature, a son of God. We are all brothers, and we have to behave fraternally towards one another!

Don’t try to convince me that you live facing God, if you do not try always and in everything, to face men, any man, with sincere and open fraternity.

Men — this has always happened in history — bind their lives together to accomplish a collective mission and destiny.

—Is the unique destiny of eternal happiness worth less to the men and women of today?

The spirit of fraternity and companionship you discovered unexpectedly filled you with enthusiasm. —That is natural, for it was something you had dreamed about longingly but had never experienced. You had not experienced it because men forget they are brothers of Christ, that lovable Brother of ours, who gave his life for us, for every single one of us, without reserve.

Take note of the words of that working man who commented so enthusiastically after he had attended a gathering you had organised: “I had never heard people speak as they do here, about being noble, honest, kind and generous…” And he concluded in amazement: “Compared to the materialism of the Left or the Right, this is the true revolution.”

—Any soul can understand the fraternity Christ has established. Let us make a point of not adulterating that doctrine.