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6 Pastoral Letter – 1894

CATECHETICAL FORMATION

GIUSEPPE MARELLO
Bishop of Acqui

To the Venerable Clergy and Beloved People
of the City and the Diocese
Greetings and Blessings in the Lord

Venerable Brothers and Beloved Children in Christ,

God has put us on this earth as in a place of passage and
trial, where we can earn entry into our permanent dwelling
which is heaven. However, to earn the right to the crown of
glory in the blessed dwelling we must draw close to God with
our mind and heart, we must acknowledge and glorify him as
our sovereign Lord, and we must love him above all things as
our highest and eternal Good. We need a complex of theoretical
and speculative truths to guide our mind, and moral and
practical truths that serve as a rule to govern our heart in all its
tendencies: not only natural truths before which we often feel
weak, because of the obscurity in us caused by original sin, but
also supernatural, just as our end is supernatural, which man
cannot know except by way of divine revelation. The merciful
God deigned to come to our help and reveal to us what we must
believe and do in order to attain salvation, and we find this
revelation in the Catechism.
The Catechism is truly the book through which all, the great
and the small, can know that heavenly doctrine which must
guide men to eternal salvation. That book, small in size and

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