The Work serves without self-aggrandisement or propaganda: collective humility

Another characteristic of our service to the Church is the absence of pomp and propaganda, but imbued with the personal and collective humility we always try to cultivate. From the beginning of the Work I’ve told you that we don’t need any secrets. A discreet and very natural reserve about the intimate matters of each one’s conscience, although more necessary then, will always be part of our stock in trade.

No secrecy

But, I insist, without secrecy or secrets, which we don’t need and we don’t like. I am Aragonese, and even on the human side of my character I have a natural distaste for anything that smacks of dissimulation.

Morbid curiosity

Some people, however, give the impression that they live on a balcony, feeding off what people say and from statistics, and who seem to have pretence as a golden rule of their existence. With a mentality like that they can never understand us.

A sickly curiosity which leads one to investigate the private life of others, getting to know things which ought not to trespass the boundaries of conscience, often has no other effect than to kill off a vocation and do harm to the Church; it is incapable of grasping the deep Christian sense of our way of working.

Statistics: norms and reasons for prudence

These people make statistics out of everything – except the money they deal with – and they don’t seem to realise that there are spiritual things, the greater part of which are important and cannot be reduced to numbers.

I certainly do not despise statistics. I see them as necessary. But I think, and I see this clearly, that they should not be given the publicity they sometimes get. And I am not basing this on the memory of the recent experiences in Spain, during the religious persecution by the communist regime, but also on what I know about other nations.