Cultivate friendship

Such frank, effective disinterestedness is made possible, nourished, by our constant conversation with our Father God, our trusting devotion to Our Lady, our love for the Church and the Pope, and our prayer and mortification. Relying on this, you must try and make friends with your colleagues and the people you are in touch with for any reason.

As a requirement of human fraternity

You will certainly not do so, my daughters and sons, in order to use friendship as a tactic for social penetration: that would rob friendship of its intrinsic value. Rather, friendship is a requirement – the first and most immediate one – of human fraternity, which we Christians are obliged to foster among our fellow-men, no matter how different they may be from one another.

Out of love for God

And at the same time, we act out of love for God. For friendship gives people the confidence to open up, and thus makes the doctrinal apostolate possible, enabling us to bring the people around us, our friends whose good we desire, closer to Our Lord.