A conference for women given in Viña del Mar in 1946

The fashionable illness of our times is neurosis. One of the professions with plenty of work is psychiatry… Many of those who believe themselves to be suffering from neurosis are suffering rather from the emptiness of their lives. They have nothing to do, nothing to take them out of themselves. They live concentrated on their interior life, always looking at themselves in the mirror of their thoughts to see how they are: doing well or badly; to see if others esteem them or not; if they looked at them, why did they do so, if not why have they stopped… Castles in the air… built on what others think of them… Neurosis is at the door; life has been colored with sadness forever. Egoism is at the root of the evil! How can this neurosis be cured? Before you go off to a psychiatrist I would advise a person to consult a prudent spiritual director. It is possible that the root of this problem may be a hidden complex buried within since your early years but it is more probable that it is simply an emptiness of life, life without meaning; a soul waiting to be filled, to have its very existence given meaning.

To simply vegetate is so sad! To see the years pass with nothing done! No one to look at you with grateful eyes… nowhere to turn, to look for love.

In this area, Christianity, as in everything else, is not only a law of holiness but also one of spiritual and mental health. For some the Christian moral code is enormously complicated, long, detailed and rather narrow… one easy to violate without even noticing. It is a collection of ordinarily negative laws: don’t do this or that… How can I fill up my life with negations?

Happily, the truth is very different. Christianity is not a collection of prohibitions but a great affirmation… and not many either, one: Love. “God is love” (1Jn 4,8) and the moral of those who have been created in the image and likeness of God, is the moral of Love. Which is the greatest commandment of the Law? Love… and the second is like to the first: love your neighbor as yourself (cf. Mt 22, 37-39). For this reason, Bossuet with his great genius could say: “Let us be Christians, that is to say, let us love our brothers.”

The best way to fill our lives: fill them with love and in doing so we are simply fulfilling the precept of the Master. Shortly before leaving this world and wanting to sum up his teaching in a fundamental precept, he left us these words: “I give you a new commandment: that you love one another… In this all will know that you are my disciples: if you have love one for another”… (cf. Jn 13, 34-35). In this, and only in this the world will know you are my disciples!

The first Christians: How can a man be saved? Loving him, suffering with him, identifying with him, in pain, in his own suffering. Not with discourses that cost nothing to deliver, nor sermons that do not change our lives, but with a clear expression of love! The Church does not need activists but rather witnesses.

This is why I believe that in these difficult times in which we live, God in His immense mercy is going to raise up new spirits. I would not be surprised to see a new congregation dressed in overalls with a vow to work in factories and live in slum areas in order to save the world as we have seen the little Sisters of the Assumption and those of the Holy Cross giving themselves entirely for the redemption of the suffering. I have just finished reading a marvelous work of a priest worker who had himself deported in order to help save his expatriate brothers, a laborer like themselves…

Among all men there are those whom Christ recommends to us in a special way, his poor. Who is my neighbor? a doctor of the Law asked Jesus, who responded: A poor man went down on the road from Jericho… half dead… Go and do the same (cf. Lk 15, 29-37). And the doing or not doing of these works of charity for our neighbor is so important in the eyes of God that it will be the basis of our judgment: I was hungry… I was thirsty… I was in prison…you did not give… (cf. Mt 25, 31-46). Our neighbor, the poor in particular, is Christ in person. Whatever you do to the least of my brothers that you do unto me. The poor newspaper boys, the shoeshine boy, the tubercular woman, all are Christ. The drunk… don’t be scandalized, he is Christ! To insult him, to despise him, to make fun of him, is to despise Christ. What you do to the least of my brothers that you do to me! This is the reason for the name Hogar de Cristo, the Home of Christ.

There is a great deal of talk these days about the Christian social order and with good reason. This order takes for granted legislation based on the common good, in social justice but it is an order only possible if Christians are filled with a desire to love that is translated into giving. Fewer words and more works. The modern world is anti-intellectual: it believes in what it sees, in concrete deeds.

When the poor see, and feel their pain and look to us Christians; what have they the right to ask of us? Of us who believe that Christ lives in each poor man? Will they accept our faith if they see us keeping all the comforts, hating communism because of what it threatens to take from us rather than for its atheism? What should our attitude be? A social sense! Serve, give, love. Fill your life with these others.