3. While therefore with good reason we congratulate France on being a focus of apostolic work among nations destitute of the faith, we are also bound to encourage the efforts of those of her sons who, enrolled in the priesthood of Jesus Christ, are laboring to evangelize their own people, to preserve them from the invasion of naturalism and incredulity, with their fatal and inevitable consequences. Called by the will of God to be the savour of the world, priests must always, and above all things, remember that they are by the very institution of Jesus Christ, "the salt of the earth,"¹ and hence St. Paul, writing to Timothy, justly concluded that "by their charity, their faith and their purity, they must be an example to the faithful in their words and in their relations with their neighbors."²