The
teaching of Jesus Christ must reach all peoples, and many places that
were once Christian need to be evangelized anew. The Church's mission is
universal and is addressed to people of every condition: of different
cultures and ways of being, of very different ages.... From the
beginning of the Church, the faith has reached young and old, the
wealthy and the slaves, the educated and the uneducated.... The Apostles
and those who succeeded them maintained a firm unity in what was
necessary, and the Church did not strive to standardize all those who
converted. And the ways of evangelizing were also very different: some
fulfilled a very important mission with their writings in defense of
Christianity and its right to exist, others preached in the squares, and
the majority carried out a discreet apostolate in their own families,
with their neighbors and companions in their professions or hobbies. All
the baptized had in common fraternal charity, unity in the doctrine
they had received, the sacraments, obedience to the legitimate
pastors....
In everyone we can sow the doctrine of Christ,
separating with extreme delicacy the thorns that would make the seed
unfruitful. We Christians, in the apostolic task entrusted to us by the
Lord, "exclude no one, we do not exclude any soul from our love for
Jesus Christ.
For
this reason," St. Josemaría Escrivá advised, "you should cultivate a
firm, loyal, sincere, that is, Christian friendship with all your
professional companions, and even more so with all people, whatever
their personal circumstances. The Christian is, by vocation, a man open
to others, with the capacity to get along with people who are very
different in culture, age or character.
Our relationship with
Jesus in prayer leads us to have a large heart in which there is room
for people both near and far, without narrow and short-sighted
mentalities, which are not of Christ. Let us examine in prayer if we
respect and love the diversity of ways of being that we encounter every
day with those with whom we live, if we see as a richness of the Church
the fact that they are really different from us in their tastes, ways of
being or thinking.
Hablar con Dios