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6th Pastoral Letter of the Bishop of Acqui

modest in appearance, embraces the science about God, the
angels, man and the world; the science of the first principle and
the final end of creation, the fall, redemption, grace and the
Sacraments, time and eternity. In that book we find the Apostle's
Creed, that is, the infallibly sure rule of our belief; the
Decalogue, that is, the Divine Commandments, which are the
norm dictated by God that regulates our actions; and there are
also all the treasures of the supernatural gifts of grace that
maintain our faith alive and our charity active in us. With short,
clear and harmoniously organized formulas, the book of the
Catechism explains the necessary and timely truths that are
centered in God, one in essence and three in Persons, and the
works of creation, redemption, sanctification and glorification. It
explains all the duties that we must accomplish and which
substantially boil down to loving God and our neighbor; all the
means to follow the divine graces, which are prayer and the
Sacraments, whose head is the unique Mediator between God
and men, Jesus Christ the Man-God. In the school of the
Catechism all, even children, even persons of lesser intelligence,
learn that irrefutable, true, universal knowledge that the wise of
the world have been seeking for so many centuries and are still
seeking, but in vain, making a mockery of the systems that
change with their authors and do not produce any fruit other
than doubt and unbelief.
It has been written that to civilize populations and improve
their customs, to make them progress in every virtue, it would
have sufficed to spread intellectual culture, and that every
school that opens is a prison that closes. Yet for many years
instruction has been spread more widely, schools have been set
up everywhere, teachers are multiplied, books and newspapers
are in everyone's hands, and yet who can say that the facts
correspond to the great hopes?
The contrary is proved by the crime statistics that show with
the evidence of numbers how corruption is progressing, how

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