List of points

The world is waiting for us to wake up those who are asleep, to encourage the timid, to guide those who have lost their way; in other words, for us to enrol them in the ranks of Christ, so that such a lot of energy is not lost.

God wants his children to be on the offensive. —We cannot just ‘wait and see’. Our business is to fight, wherever we may be, as an army in battle array.

I think it is very natural for you to want the whole world to know Christ. But start with the responsibility of saving the souls of those who live with you and sanctifying each one of your fellow workers or fellow students. That is the principal mission that the Lord has entrusted to you.

You should behave as if it all depended on you: whether the atmosphere in your place of work is to be one of hard work, cheerfulness, presence of God and supernatural outlook.

—Why are you so apathetic? If you come across a group at work who are a bit difficult, you lose interest in them. Perhaps they have become difficult because you have neglected them. Yet you throw in the towel and think of them as a dead weight which holds back your apostolic ideals because they do not understand you…

—You may love and serve them with your prayer and mortification, but how do you expect them to listen to you if you never speak to them…?

—You will have many surprises the day you decide to talk to them one by one. What is more, if you do not change, they will one day be able to point a finger at you and say quite rightly: Hominem non habeo — I have no one to help me!

You say you cannot be happy to live like everyone else, with the faith of the crowd. —Indeed, you have to have a personal faith joined to a sense of personal responsibility.

The Most Holy Trinity grants you grace and expects you to make use of it responsibly. Given such an endowment, there is no place for your adopting easy, slow, lazy attitudes… because, apart from everything else, souls await you.

If you really love your own country, and I am sure you do, you would not hesitate to enlist as a volunteer to defend it from imminent danger. As I wrote to you before, everyone can be useful in an emergency: men and women; the old, the middle-aged, the young and even adolescents. Only invalids and children are left out.

Every day there is a call, not just for volunteers to enlist — that is very little — but for a general mobilisation of souls to defend Christ’s Kingdom. And the King himself, Jesus, has called you expressly by your name. He asks you to fight in God’s battles, and to put at his service the noblest powers of your soul: your heart, your will, your understanding, all your being.

—Listen to me: the flesh, with your clean life and especially with the protection of the Virgin Mary, is no problem. Are you going to be such a coward as to try to get out of being enlisted with the excuse that your heart or will or intellect are weak? Are you going to pretend to claim some grounds for remaining in the ancillary services?

—The Lord wants to make you an instrument for the front line —you are one already— and if you turn your back you deserve only pity, as a traitor.

In the hour of rejection at the Cross, the Virgin Mary is there by her Son, willing to go through the same fate. —Let us lose our fear of behaving like responsible Christians when the environment in which we move is not easy. She will help us.