[2] Pope Benedict XVI spoke on the Universal Call to Holiness during his General Audience of Wednesday, 13 April 2011, saying:...The saints expressed in various ways the powerful and transforming presence of the Risen One.
The Second Vatican Council, in the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, speaks with clarity of the universal call to holiness, saying that no one is excluded: "The forms and tasks of life are many but holiness is one—that sanctity which is cultivated by all who act under God's Spirit and… follow Christ, poor, humble and cross-bearing, that they may deserve to be partakers of his glory" (Lumen Gentium, n. 41)[3]The universal call to holiness is rooted in baptism, and the Paschal Mystery, which configures a person to Jesus Christ who is truly God and truly man, thus uniting a person with the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, bringing him in communion with intra-trinitarian life.
Ben Sira taught about lay people that "without these cannot a city be inhabited," and "they will maintain the state of the world, and all their desire is in the work of their craft.
"[5] John Paul II states in his apostolic Letter Novo Millennio Ineunte,[6] his apostolic letter for the new millennium, a "program for all times", that holiness is not only a state but a task, whereby Christians should strive for a full Christian life, imitating Christ, God the Son, who gave his life for God the Father and for his neighbor.
The universal call to holiness is explained as more fundamental than the vocational discernment to particular ways of life such as priesthood, marriage, or virginity.