SPIRITUAL FORMATION

CUF headquarters will provide suggestions for materials that bear on spiritual growth. We will recommend formative books and resources to deepen and purify the spiritual lives of our members and to help them understand the crucial issues that affect Catholics today. With this spiritual grounding, the CUF chapter's actions have greater assurance of guidance from Our Lord, who alone renders action truly effective.

It is essential to dispel a great illusion that grips too many Catholics, even those who may respond enthusiastically to CUF's mission and purpose: the illusion that their orthodoxy, piety, and conduct are impeccable and beyond question.

Such Catholics are impatient with "spiritual" books, with meditations on the Gospels, or with reading lives of the saints. They want at once to get to the "real" task of actively combatting perceived heresies, injustices, and abuses in the Church.

It may be said that prayer without good works avails nothing, but a man ignorant of prayer will perform good works only by accident. Thus, we exhort all CUF members and indeed all Catholics to seek genuine spiritual growth as the necessary prerequisite for effective apostolic action

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It is a duty of all CUF members to pray for all bishops and priests and to urge others to do likewise. This practice moves our support for the hierarchy to a deeper level. As we work actively to build up the Church, we must faithfully plead for heavenly intercession. May bonds of mutual prayer be forged among Catholics, and let them in this way testify to the reality of the supernatural.

All CUF members organize and work with quiet confidence. We have divine assurance that the cause we support will never fail. Our "success" is not measured so much in external, quantifiable effects as it is in our fidelity to divine grace. Therefore, nothing we do on behalf of Christ and His Mystical Body in a spirit of docility and obedience to Church authority is ever wasted. We promise all who Join us that our cause—of the Pope, of the Church, of Christ—is certain to prevail.