“ This is the mission given to you – and being given it enhances your stature – to be the model of untiring inward energy towards the new relationship and attitude to the world, to service of the world, which the Church seeks to embody. How can this be done? Through that blending of two realities which is the very shape and fashion of your lives.

First of all, your consecrated life in the spirit of the evangelical counsels means that you belong inseparably to Christ and the Church…

In the second place, because you are essentially secular you accentuate your relationship with the world (and in this you differ from Religious). Secularity is not simply your condition as people living in the world, an external condition. It is rather an attitude, the attitude of people who are aware that they have a responsibility, being in the world, to serve the world, to make it as God would have it, more just, more human, to sanctify it from within. ” (Feb. 2, 1972)