16 — RIGHT INTENTION

Presence of God. — O God, tear from my heart every secondary intention, every movement of self-love, so that I may seek only your glory.

Meditation

1 — Many failures in apostolate come from the fact that apostolic activity is not carried out with the very conditions it requires and that are indispensable if it is to become an intense exercise of spiritual life.

There is often a certain disorder, motives more or less human, which creep into that activity, lowering it from the supernatural plane to the merely human one, and turning it into an occasion of deviation and cooling of interior life. Then the soul feels dissatisfied and restless.

Pius XII, in the Motu proprio Primo feliciter, expressed very clearly the conditions of holy activity: “Apostolate must always be exercised holily, with such purity of intention, with such interior union with God, with such generous forgetfulness and strong self-denial, and with such love for souls, that it may spring from the interior spirit that animates it and at the same time continually nourish and renew that same spirit.”

If we examine our apostolate in this light, we can identify its weak points, discover defects to avoid, and also remedies to apply. The conditions proposed are four: purity of intention, union with God, self-denial, and love of souls. They are of such importance that, while ensuring apostolic fruitfulness, they also make apostolate an effective means of spiritual progress.

Let us first consider purity of intention. If no one can “serve God and mammon” (Mt 6:24), still less can the apostle give himself to apostolic activity with a double intention: to serve God and self-love, to please God and the world, to seek the good of souls and personal interests.

Strength, peace, and life come from unity; fragmentation, even spiritual fragmentation, can bring only weakness, division, conflict, and finally death. The apostle whose heart is divided by opposed intentions will seek peace in vain in his work; he will always remain troubled and unsatisfied.

2 — Secondary intentions can appear in a coarse way, easily seen, but also in such subtle ways that a distracted soul does not notice them at all. To detect even the smallest secondary intentions, which like little foxes stealthily ruin apostolic activity, one needs an atmosphere of recollection and prayer.

In pauses at the Lord’s feet, the apostle realizes that during daily occupations he often loses sight of the supernatural end that should animate his activity, and that secondary ends take its place and become the immediate motive of many decisions and actions.

This means his intention does not remain directed uniquely toward God and souls, but often deviates under the influence of self-love: sometimes a more or less unconscious search for praise and glory, at other times concerns about personal advantage or material interest—keeping a position, obtaining advancement, being preferred by superiors, being chosen for more attractive or profitable works.

In short, he must acknowledge that alongside love of God and souls there is still much self-love and egoism. Faced with this discouraging picture he should not lose heart, but humbly recognize his misery and thank the Lord who reveals it so that he may correct it.

He must not, however, think that everything he does is only the fruit of self-love. No: when a person has given himself to apostolate moved by a sincere desire to do the Lord’s will and win hearts for Him, he is truly animated by love of God and souls. Yet it must also be admitted that this love is not yet strong enough to triumph totally over human passions.

Therefore the apostle must never stop fighting all manifestations, even minimal ones, of self-love. He must not indulge them under the pretext that they are natural movements, but correct them, mortify them, repress them, cut them off without pity, continually rectifying his intentions.

A long and deep purification is necessary to conquer completely the dualism between God and self, love of souls and love of self. One must beg the Lord for this grace of total purification and dispose oneself to receive it by making good use of all occasions of detachment, renunciation, sacrifice, and humiliation that apostolic activity offers in abundance to one who seriously embraces it.

Walking this path, the apostle will find in his work an excellent means of spiritual ascent and, instead of becoming entangled in the dangers that external activity presents when self-love is not repressed, he will be purified through the exercise of his apostolate.

Colloquy

“O Lord, when I want to pray or work for the good of souls, I must first raise the eye of my mind to You, eternal Light, and to your splendor, so that You may give me light, strengthen my spirit, and help me withdraw as much as possible from external things in order to be wholly interior and turned toward interior realities.

“Grant that in my neighbor I may consider only the interior man, caring for the exterior only insofar as it serves the interior, so that all the rest may be set aside as vanity and I may not be drawn to vain things.

“My God, may I be moved to apostolate, to prayer, and to good example only by the desire to save souls, and not by vainglory, ambition, human complacency, or worldly utility. You alone, O crucified Christ, do I want to seek!

“I want to intoxicate souls with your Blood and not with curiosity, so that they may desire You alone. I want to say to each of them: I know nothing except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.

“Therefore I do not want earthly advantages, and I do not care to please men; nor do I judge myself to know any person or anything other than You, Christ crucified.

“O Lord, so intoxicate me with your love that whatever else is offered to my sight or taste, hearing or any other sense—anything but You—I may consider as nothing, so that I may find no delight, no glory, no rest save in your Blood, to which I wish to be totally turned. Grant that my eyes may be filled not with earthly things but with your suffering; grant that my mouth may be filled not with vain words but with your Passion, and likewise all my other senses” (cf. St. Bonaventure).