List of points

“It’s very difficult”, you exclaim, disheartened.

Listen, if you make an effort, with the grace of God that is enough. Put your own interests to one side, you will serve others for God, and you will come to the aid of the Church in the field where the battles are being fought today: in the street, in the factory, in the workshop, in the university, in the office, in your own surroundings, amongst your family and friends.

To be convinced that it is ridiculous to take fashion as a principle for your behaviour, you need only to look at some old portraits.

As we talked, he assured me that he never wanted to leave the hut where he lived, because he preferred to count the beams of “his” shack rather than the stars in heaven.

—There are many like him who are incapable of leaving their own petty things so as to raise their eyes to heaven: it is time they acquired a loftier vision!

Your Christian vocation requires you to be in God and, at the same time, to be concerned with the things of the earth, using them objectively, just as they are: to give them back to Him.

Ideologically you are very Catholic. You like the atmosphere of the hall of residence. A pity the Mass is not at twelve, and the classes are not in the afternoon, so you can study late in the evening after one or two drinks. That “Catholicism” of yours does not come up to the real thing: it remains simply bourgeois.

—Don’t you see that you can’t think like that at your age? Leave behind your laziness and your self-worship… and adapt to the needs of others, to the reality around you, then you will be taking your Catholicism seriously.

A person who had donated a statue of a saint to a church said: “This saint owes everything that he is to me.”

This is not just a caricature. You also think — at least that is how it looks from your behaviour — that you fulfil your duties towards God just by wearing some medals or practising certain pious customs, more or less as a routine.

It is surprising how often, even in the name of freedom, many people fear and oppose Catholics being simply good Catholics.