SOME SUGGESTIONS from Blessed Dr Pere Tarrés ON ORGANISED APOSTOLATE
1. What does an apostle need to have?
Apostle: a man with passion is his heart and a burning spirit; prudent as a dove and wise as a serpent.
To act as an apostle, managing to gain respect among the purely secular is a pre requisite.
Conquest: the first soul you need to conquer is your own. You then have to conquer the unconscious soul of every people.
Perseverance: a fundamental point in ensuring the work is successful.
Duty: in the fulfilment of our daily, constant, monotonous, indeed selfless duty lies our truly vast area of action; of true and effective Catholic action. It is the fabric woven with infinite initiatives, ideas, the realities of unrecognised work, sacrifices, renunciations prayers – all driven by the force of an idea: the world’s salvation.
Foundations of human activity: perseverance and perfection. Progressive improvement of the acts or disciplines imposed.
Hero: whoever acts with perseverance to the end, even if their work in the organisation remains unseen.
Patriotism: an essential quality inherent to the soul of all peoples. It is like one virtue more of the soul that God instils in all men; it represents love for the earth in all respects; for all those characteristics that distinguish it and make it, and no other, their homeland, and which if it lost them, it would no longer be.
And us; must we be ashamed of loving our homeland? God, who is good, has granted it to us as our homeland. And our patriotism is pure; so very pure.
Purity or chastity: the purity of youth is the firmest guarantee of the future of our homeland. In the eyes of the world, it is tainted as something vile, degrading and despicable. That rarefied atmosphere with its luxuriant stench has nested in the hearts of a few souls. Impurity is the body’s great sore.
2. Instruments for action
Action: transcendental, formative factor in selection. There is nothing that dries out the spirit like a life of action: there is nothing more dangerous to a soul than throwing yourself into unfettered activity without any control; without the soft dew of an intense inner life, even in the very work of preaching for Catholic Action.
Weapons: sacrifice and prayer together constitute the two most powerful weapons for preaching. Holy Communion is an unconquerable weapon.
Managing Committee: candidates will exclusively be devout activists attending study groups, with a deep inner life and exemplary public and private conduct – never the ambitious.
Study circles: constant research work done by yourself.
Groups: the internal and external activity and vitality of groups is what gives life to the Federation of Young Christians of Catalonia (FJC). A group that is isolated will die. It is not a club in which some command and others oppose. It must be a hive in which each activist leaves behind the honey of their comradeship; of their initiatives; of their actions and work. They must become true focal points in which love for God and the homeland burn unendingly. They must always work on concrete actions. They must have a defined focus. They must send a note to the General Secretariat each month outlining their activity.
Sections: are the means to incorporate the young masses into the group. They must be well controlled and led by activists. If we allow a section to function without direct control and without active intervention by activists, we will soon see that group become dismembered.
Congress: we prepare for Congress. Let it be the subject of our conversations, study circles and general meetings. Let us overrun the regional press. Let us live only one thought: Congress. Let us have a single obsession: the success of Congress. Let us add to our prayers a plea for the apostolic efficacy of the Congress.
Activists: first of all, it is advisable to train the leaders of the future masses. The fundamental points of the FJC technique must be studied. There is a select minority in each group. The work of training is long; it acts as a filter that would amaze other organisations. There is perseverance. Leaders must be pure gold; unadulterated; forged in the practice of all Christian virtues.
The activist will experience a lot of disappointments: when least expected, a member or members of the respective sections will make them suffer and will repay everything they have done for them with contempt and indifference.
Priests: love our priests, who are the greatest friends we young people have. The clergy has become flesh of our flesh and life of our life. We are absolutely convinced that without the collaboration of the Councillor, the FJC’s work would have ended.
A man anointed a priest is the lightning rod of divine justice. If only one priest were to come out of the Federation, it would be worth creating it.
Discipline: must be freely accepted; vigorous and persistent; indispensable and the basis of any organisation; forger of free men; secret of our successes. It makes men of ideals.
Enthusiasm: an essentially indispensable quality in any organisation that aspires to conquer the great masses. It is life, love, bravery, talent; it is, in a word, the power to create. It is indispensable for leaders to experience a piercing, incisive, tumultuous enthusiasm and to know how to take that to the masses and make them feel the same shiver of excitement.
Example: the example has lost us; but the example will vindicate us.
Success: the success of large organisations consists of the balance between each of the elements that move them, even the most insignificant.
Financing: the group’s deficits must be cleared up, and cleared up well, obliging individual sacrifices where appropriate.
Catholics are not very accustomed to contributing. What we spend on trifles seems enormous to us when it goes towards a work of Catholic action.
Foundations of human activity: perseverance and perfection. Progressive improvement of the acts or disciplines imposed.
Heroism: throwing yourself into work for Christ’s cause in secularised and materialistic regions that are full of lustfulness. In Catalonia, all values have been broken down (and that could be said of many parts of the West).
Organisation: our instruction is reduced to one word: organisation.
Our motto: organisation. Our work will be powerful only in so far as it is well organised and the many spheres that it is made up of are good ones.
Selection: its only purpose is to mould the masses.
3. Setbacks
Cliques: the clique spirit is one of our racial defects and it has been the ruin of magnificent organisations.
It is nothing more than an exaggeration, to an excessive degree, of our estimation of ourselves, which translates into pride or arrogance. At FJC, we must avoid even the possibility of having cliques.
Individualism: consumes everything.
The force of the environment: Catholics who are ashamed of being so must disappear.
Praise: it is good to deserve it, but it is even better to know how to shy away from it.
Mediocrity: will never achieve any enterprise. We cannot settle for indolence. ‘To chug along’… Talent together with strong willpower is the only thing that lifts people up and strengthens their spirit.
Leisure: sign of death.
4. Objectives
Defects of youth: we know them and we are here to banish them.
The ‘Godless’: in our xxxx they have shown their faces. Nobody persecutes them. It does not matter that they go against everything moral. This leads them to fight against all things spiritual and tear them down. Our people suffer the harmful effects of forgetting God; of hating God.
FJC: we are not a fighting organisation. Our combat is against the worst enemy: each one of us.
Our aim is not to build centres in which to go and play or spend the afternoon. Our aim is to train men who are useful to the homeland: to defend the interests of the Catholic Church. We pursue the moral invigoration of Catalonia, and the most perfect possible all-embracing training of young people in accordance with the Church’s guidelines: spiritual, cultural and physical.
For our work to triumph, we must construct an entity that can be extensively controlled with each and every one of its many mechanisms.
The FJC flies above all else so that men may realise that Jesus is the centre: the magnet for activity in the world. It wants all men to recognise that cornerstone against which so very many proud men’s understanding clashes.
Milestone: Re-Christianisation of the world. In the face of the turbulence inside so many men is the vivid purity of our transparent and honest souls; in the face of hate, anger and shame, the most solicitous charity; in the face of the tyranny of so many, the holy freedom of God’s children.
Ideal: our ideal makes us heroes: audacious, brave, optimistic, believers in the triumph of our cause. The ideal is the driver; it is the irresistible force that moves willpower.
Nonetheless, no patron of perfection can go beyond the ideal that any Christian who boasts that they are a disciple of Christ must have: the ideal of God. The ideal of knowing God; having God; loving God sublimely.
Sceptics: we must not separate ourselves from those who do not believe or think as we do. The tactic of separation leads to sterility, the creation of hate, ideological struggles and class struggles.
World: the world without God is nothing.
Youth work: in order to carry out fruitful work, you have to know the difficulties we will encounter, the environment against which we will have to fight, and the moral and social condition of different young people.
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http://www.fiamc.org/bioethics/apostolado-organizado/
