The novelty of the Work is the Gospel itself

However, this “newness” of ours, my children, is as old as the Gospel. From the moment when Jesus Christ said that he was the Way, and the Truth and the Life (John 14:6), and invited everyone to follow him,²⁷ right from the earliest times of the Church’s life, there burst forth in the souls of many faithful the desire to undertake the search for perfection which was outlined in the Gospel and practised by Christ himself as our model: a life of personal holiness and apostolic action.

Early Christians

And so the genuine spirituality of the Gospel started to produce abundant fruits of holiness in every sphere of the pagan society in which the early Christians lived. They were men and women who practised their faith sincerely, and as a result brought new members into the Church. They worked quite naturally alongside everyone else, as citizens if they were citizens, and as slaves if they were slaves. They practised fraternity to an exquisite degree and dedicated themselves to God and to the spreading of the Good News, in the measure of the gifts they had each received.²⁸ The result was that the whole of pagan society was Christianised.