List of points

Nowadays it is not enough for men and women to be good. Moreover, it is not good enough to be satisfied with being nearly… good. It is necessary to be ‘revolutionary’.

Faced by hedonism, faced by the pagan and materialistic wares that we are being offered, Christ wants objectors! — rebels of Love!

Worldly men go out of their way to make souls lose God as soon as possible; and then, make them lose the world. They do not love this world of ours. They exploit it by trampling over others!

—I really do hope you too won’t fall victim to this double swindle!

Some people feel embittered all the time. Everything makes them uneasy. They go to sleep with a physical obsession: that this sleep, the only possible escape, is not going to last very long. They wake up with the unwelcome and disheartening feeling that they now have another day in front of them.

Many have forgotten that the Lord has placed us in the world on our way to eternal happiness. They do not realise that only those who walk on earth with the joy of the children of God will be able to attain it.

Through your behaviour as a Christian citizen, show people the difference between living sadly and living cheerfully; between being timid and being daring; between acting cautiously, with duplicity — hypocritically — and acting as men of simplicity and integrity. In a word, between being worldly and being children of God.

A fundamental error against which you must be on guard is to think that the noble and just customs and needs of your times and environment cannot be directed and accommodated to the holiness of the moral teaching of Jesus Christ.

Notice that I have specified that the customs and needs should be “noble and just”. The other ones lack the right to be adopted by citizens.

Under the pressure and impact of a materialistic, pleasure-loving, faithless world, how can we demand and justify the freedom of not thinking as they do, and of not acting as they do?

—A son of God has no need to ask for that freedom, because Christ won it for us once and for all. But he does need to defend it and practise it whatever the circumstance he finds himself in. Only thus will they understand that our freedom is not bound up in our surroundings.