Loving the work of St Raphael

My daughters and sons, you who are younger and you who are not so young, always have a lively concern for our St Raphael work. We must, I repeat, regard it with a special love. It has to be the apple of our eye.

Prayer and deeds: going out to seek people

This concern has to express itself in constant prayer and in deeds. Your apostolic zeal will lead you to go forth to all the cross-roads of the world in search of souls to communicate Christ’s call to them. “Although Christ could have stayed in one place and attracted people to himself to hear his preaching, he did not do so. He set us an example, so that we too should take to the roads, in search of those who are lost, just as the shepherd searches for a sheep that has strayed, or the doctor goes out to visit a patient.”²⁰

St John Chrysostom writes that “when the Lord says to his disciples, 'You are the salt of the earth’, he is letting them see the need to do what he has commanded. `Because you’, he says, 'are not to be concerned just for your own selves, but for the whole world. I am not sending you, as I sent the prophets, to two cities, or to ten, or twenty, nor even to a single nation. No, your mission extends to land and sea, without any more limits than the world itself, despite its corruption.’”²¹ “And when he calls them light, again he speaks about the world – lux mundi – not just a single nation, nor twenty cities, but the whole world. The light he means is an intelligible light, far superior to the rays of the sun we see, just as the salt is a spiritual salt. First salt, then light, so that you may learn how profitable sharp words may be and how useful serious doctrine. Such teaching holds in check and prevents dissipation; it leads to virtue and causes clear sight.”²²

You will go, then, and seek out souls wherever they are, in order to attract them to the warmth of our spirit, to the divine light of our work of formation. You will place them under the patronage of the Archangel St Raphael and the Apostle St John, to set them on fire, to purify them, to fill them with doctrine and love for God, and with a noble devotion to Our Lady, to the Holy Church, and to the Roman Pontiff.

With a blessing from your Father.