6. The chief purpose of the Labour Office — apart from the practical ends for which it was brought into existence — is to promote and preserve a work community among the various levels of staff of the Apostolic See, especially the laypeople. The spirit of this community should be characteristic of all who have been called to the privilege and responsibility of serving the Petrine ministry.

Again and again it is to be explained that these workers are in duty bound to foster and cultivate within themselves a special awareness of the Church, an awareness making them ever more fitted to fulfill the functions entrusted to them, no matter what these may be. These functions are not mere give and take arrangements — a certain labour given and a certain wage received —, as may happen in institutions in civil society; they constitute rather a service offered to Christ himself "who came not to be served but to serve" (Mt 20:28).

Therefore all the workers of the Holy See, clergy and laity, out of a sense of honour and sincerely conscious of their own duty before God and themselves, must resolve that their lives as priests and lay faithful shall be lived at an exemplary level, as is proposed by God’s commandments, by the laws of the Church and by the pronouncements of the Second Vatican Council, especially in Lumen gentium, Presbyterorum ordinis, and Apostolicam actuositatem. However, this is a free decision, by which with full awareness certain responsibilities are taken on, the force of which is felt not only on the individuals but also on their families and even on the actual work community composed of all the collaborators of the Holy See.

Well may we be asked "of whose spirit we are" (cf. Lk 9:55 Vulg.): thus the Pope writes at the end of the Apostolic Letter. So each and all, in searching their own sincerity as human beings and as Christians, are bound to be faithful to those promises, and to keep those bonds that they freely accepted when they were chosen to labour at the Holy See.