Lest You Remain

battle with temptation, after a victory has been won, would bestow upon his faith- ful extraordinary graces: spiritual comforts, visions, revelations (oh, how undeserv- ing you are of them!), the highest charisms and heavenly gifts. Fight, fight heroically and persevere! Topic X : APOSTOLATE The Word of the Lord (Mt 28:16-20) The Commissioning of the Disciples. The eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had ordered them. When they saw him, they wor- shiped, but they doubted. Then Jesus approached and said to them, “All power in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age.” Church’s Documents (RD, 15) Apostolate 15. From this witness of spousal love for Christ, through which the entire salvific truth of the Gospel becomes particularly visible, there also comes, dear brothers and sisters, as something proper to your vocation, a sharing in the Church’s apostolate, in her universal mission which is accomplished contemporaneously in every nation in many different ways and through many different charisms. Your specific mission is in harmony with the mission of the Apostles, whom the Lord sent “to the whole world” to “teach all nations,” (95) and it is also linked to the mis- sion of the hierarchical order. In the apostolate which consecrated persons exercise, their spousal love for Christ becomes, in an organic way as it were, love for the Church as the Body of Christ, for the Church as the People of God, for the Church which is at one and the same time Spouse and Mother. It is difficult to describe, or even to list, the many different ways in which con- secrated persons fulfill their love for the Church through the apostolate. This apos- tolate is always born from that particular gift of your founders, which, received L EST Y OU R EMAIN W ITHOUT W ORK IN THE V INEYARD OF THE L ORD 56