"The writer on the Spanish Catholic world, Frances Lannon, has described it as "a bizarre amalgam of traditional piety, penitential discipline, and crude popular moralizing; it aims at a fusion of devotion with efficiency, inward humility with the exercise of leadership and power.Its readers are exhorted to childlike simplicity, to silence and discretion, and to orderliness; they are encouraged to pray to guardian angels and to the souls in purgatory, and to bless themselves every day with holy water.