List of points

You asked me to suggest a way for winning through in your daily struggles, and I replied: When you lay your soul open, say first of all what you wouldn’t like to be known. In this way the devil will always end up defeated.

—Lay your soul wide open, clearly and simply, so that the rays of God’s Love may reach and illuminate the last corner of it!

If that dumb devil mentioned in the Gospel gets into your soul, he will spoil everything. On the other hand, if you get rid of him immediately, everything will turn out well; you will carry on merrily, and all will be well.

—A firm resolution: to be “savagely sincere” in spiritual direction, always keeping your good manners…, and to be sincere immediately.

Pray resolutely using the words of the Psalmist: “Lord, you are my refuge and my strength, I trust in thee!”

I promise you that he will preserve you from the ambushes of the “noontide devil”, when you are tempted and… even when you fall, and when your age and virtues ought to have proved solid and you should have known by heart that He alone is your Strength.

Doubts assail you, temptations, with that gloss of elegance about them.

—I love to hear you say how this shows that the devil considers you his enemy, and that God’s grace will never leave you unprotected. Keep up the struggle!

Everything seems so peaceful. God’s enemy, however, is not asleep…

—The Heart of Jesus is also awake and watching! There lies my hope.

The devil tries to draw us away from God, and if you allow him to dominate you, good people will “draw away” from you, because they “draw away” from the devil’s friends and from those possessed by him.

The enemies of God and his Church, manipulated by the devil’s unremitting hatred, are relentless in their activities and organization.

With “exemplary” constancy they prepare their cadres, run schools, appoint leaders and deploy agitators. In an undercover way — but very effectively — they spread their ideas and sow, in homes and places of work, a seed which is destructive of any religious ideology.

—What is there that we Christians should not be ready to do, always with the truth, to serve our God?