List of points

Among those around you — apostolic soul — you are the stone fallen into the lake. With your word and your example you produce a first circle… and it another… and another, and another… Wider each time.

Now do you understand the greatness of your mission?

How anxious people are to get out of place! Think what would happen if each bone and each muscle of the human body wanted to occupy some position other than that proper to it.

There is no other reason for the world's discontent. Persevere in your place, my son; there… what work you can do to establish our Lord's true kingdom!

Leaders!… Strengthen your will so that God can make a leader of you. — Consider the tactics of those infamous secret societies. They don't try to win over the masses. In their dens they form a number of demon-men who set to work stirring up the multitudes to madness, so that they will follow them to the precipice of all excess… and to hell. They spread an accursed seed.

If you wish, you will spread God's word, which is a thousand times blessed and can never fail. If you are generous…, if you respond, with your personal sanctification you will help to bring about the sanctification of others; the kingdom of Christ: omnes cum Petro ad Jesum per Mariam — 'all with Peter to Jesus through Mary.'

Is there any greater folly than to scatter the golden wheat on the ground to let it rot? Without that generous folly there would be no harvest.

Son, how do we stand as regards generosity?

You long to shine like a star, to shed your light from high in the heavens?

Better to burn like a hidden torch, setting your fire to all that you touch. That's your apostolate: that's why you are on earth.

To serve as a loud-speaker for the enemy is the height of idiocy; and if the enemy is God's enemy, it is a great sin. That is why, in the professional field, I never praise the knowledge of those who use it as rostrum from which to attack the Church.

Hurrying, hurrying! Working, working! Feverish activity, anxiety to be up and doing. Marvellous material structures…

Where spiritual things are concerned: broken up boxes, cheap cotton, painted cardboard, hurrying, working! And many people running here and there.

It is because in their work they think only of 'today'; their vision is limited to what is 'present'. You must see things with the eyes of eternity, 'keeping present' what has passed and what has yet to come…

Calmness. Peace. Intense life within you. Without that wild hurry, without that frenzy for change, you can work from your proper place in life. And, like a powerful generator of spiritual electricity, you will give light and energy to very many, without losing your own vigour and light.

Have no enemies. Have only friends: friends on the right — if they have done or have wished to do you good; and on the left — if they have harmed or tried to harm you.

Never go into details of 'your' apostolate unless it be for someone else's benefit.

May your dedication pass unnoticed as, for thirty years, did that of Jesus.

Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus visit Jesus privately when things are normal and also in the hour of triumph.

But they are courageous in the face of authority, declaring their love for Christ audacter, boldly, in the hour of cowardice. Learn from them.

Don't worry if by your deeds 'they know you.' It is the good odour of Christ. Besides, since you always work exclusively for him, you can rejoice that the words of Scripture are being fulfilled: 'May they see your good works and give praise to your Father in heaven.'

The military mind of Saint Ignatius has left us a picture of the devil calling up innumerable demons and scattering them through nations, provinces, towns and villages, after a 'sermon' in which he exhorts them to fasten their chains and fetters on the world, leaving not a single person unbound…

You have told me that you want to be a leader; and what good is a leader in chains?

Look: the apostles, for all their evident and undeniable defects, were sincere, simple… transparent.

You too have evident and undeniable defects. May you not lack simplicity.

There is a story of a soul who, on saying to our Lord in prayer, 'Jesus, I love you', heard this reply from heaven: 'Love means deeds, not sweet words.'

Think if you also could deserve this gentle reproach.

Apostolic zeal is a divine craziness I want you to have. Its symptoms are: hunger to know the Master; constant concern for souls; perseverance that nothing can shake.

Don't rest on your laurels. If, humanly speaking, that attitude is neither comfortable nor becoming, what will it be when — as now — the laurels are not really yours, but God's?

You have come to the apostolate to submit, to annihilate yourself: not to impose your own personal viewpoints.

Never be men or women of long action and short prayer.

Try to live in such a way that you can voluntarily deprive yourself of the comfort and ease you wouldn't like to see in the life of another man of God.

Remember that you are the grain of wheat the Gospel speaks of. If you don't bury yourself and die, there will be no harvest.

Be men and women of the world, but don't be worldly men and women.

Don't forget that unity is a sign of life: to disunite means putrefaction — a clear sign of being a corpse.

Obedience, the sure way. Unreserved obedience to whoever is in charge, the way of sanctity. Obedience in your apostolate, the only way: for, in a work of God, the spirit must be to obey or to leave.

Bear in mind, son, that you are not just a soul who has joined other souls in order to do a good thing.

That is a lot, but it's still little. You are the Apostle who is carrying out an imperative command from Christ.

You have got to be a 'man of God', a man of interior life, a man of prayer and sacrifice. Your apostolate must be the overflow of your life 'within'.

Unity. Unity and subjection. What good to me are the loose parts of a clock — even though they are finely— wrought — if they cannot tell me the time?

May I never see 'cliques' developing in your work. It would make a mockery of the apostolate: for if, in the end, the 'clique' got

control of a universal undertaking, how quickly that universal undertaking would be reduced to a clique itself!

'There are so many ways', you told me dejectedly. There need to be many; so that each soul can find its own in that wonderful variety.

Bewildered? Make your choice once and for all: and the bewilderment will turn into certainty.

Rejoice, when you see others working in good apostolic activities. And ask God to grant them abundant grace and that they may respond to that grace.

Then, you, on your way: convince yourself that it's the only way for you.

You show bad spirit if it hurts you to see others work for Christ without regard for what you are doing. Remember this passage in Saint Mark: 'Master, we saw a man who is not one of us casting out devils in your name; and because he was not one of us we tried to stop him.' But Jesus said, 'You must not stop him: no one who works a miracle in my name is likely to speak evil of me. Anyone who is not against us is for us'.

All that exterior activity is a waste of time, if you lack Love. It's like sewing with a needle and no thread.

What a pity if in the end you had carried out 'your' apostolate and not 'his' apostolate!

Joyfully I bless you, son, for that faith in your mission as an apostle which inspired you to write: 'There's no doubt about it: the future is certain, perhaps in spite of us. But it's essential that we should be one with the Head — 'ut omnes unum sint, that all be one!' — through prayer and sacrifice.

Those who, leaving action for others, pray and suffer, will not be noticed here; but what a radiant crown will be theirs, in the kingdom of Life! Blessed be the 'apostolate of suffering'!

It is true that I have called your discreet apostolate a 'silent and effective mission.' And I won't go back on what I said.

I think so highly of your devotion to the early Christians that I will do all I can to encourage it, so that you — like them — will put more enthusiasm each day into that effective apostolate of discretion and friendship.

When you carry out your 'apostolate of discretion and friendship', do not tell me you don't know what to say. For, with the psalmist, I will remind you: Dominus dabit verbum evangelizantibus virtute multa — the Lord places on his apostles' lips words filled with efficacy.