List of points

To be convinced that it is ridiculous to take fashion as a principle for your behaviour, you need only to look at some old portraits.

I copy for you from a letter: “I am enchanted by evangelical humility. But what infuriates me is the timid, sheepish and irresponsible way by which some Christians discredit the Church. That atheist author must have had them in mind when he wrote that Christian morality is the morality of slaves.” In fact we are servants: servants raised to the rank of children of God, who do not wish to behave as if enslaved by their passions.

Do not forget that in human affairs other people may also be right: they see the same question as you, but from a different point of view, under another light, with other shades, with other contours.

—Only in faith and morals is there an indisputable standard: that of our Mother the Church.

Your Christian vocation requires you to be in God and, at the same time, to be concerned with the things of the earth, using them objectively, just as they are: to give them back to Him.

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.

I cannot understand you when you talk about matters of morals and of faith and you tell me that you are an independent Catholic…

—From whom are you independent? That false independence is equivalent to leaving the way of Christ.

One feels sorry for people who say from their own sad experience that you cannot be chaste while living and working in the middle of the world!

—If they accepted the consequences of their illogical reasoning, they ought not to feel hurt if others were to insult the memory of their parents, brothers or sisters, wife or husband.