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St. Joseph Marello - 1894

crimes of every kind are on the rise and, painful to say, how the
number of juvenile delinquents is increasing.
For the moral perfection of man, it does not suffice to have
a culture of the mind without an education of the heart; or to say
it better: instruction without the accompaniment of religion
cannot give true light to the intellect and move the will
effectively to good; because to progress morally, man must
know the end by which he moves, the end to which he tends, the
model that must serve as norm, and the strength that must give
him the necessary and timely help. Now, only the Catechism, in
revealing to us the mystery of original sin, can make us know
that man is born weak and corrupt, and therefore the first law of
moral progress is not to support the instincts of corrupt nature,
but to impede them; not to condescend to every inclination, but
to dominate, mortify and deny oneself. Those who believe in
eternal life know the way of their earthly pilgrimage, they know
that their end is not the earth, but heaven; not creation but the
Creator; and that the soul who aspires to anything but the eternal
Truth, the eternal Beauty, the eternal and infinite Good does not
rise, but descends precipitously. In believing in Jesus Christ we
hear the voice of faith that cries out: behold the ideal of your
life, conform your thoughts to his thoughts, your affections to
his affections, your actions to his actions; be transfigured from
light to light in his image. Finally, believing in the
efficaciousness of prayer, the Sacraments, the Divine Sacrifice,
the Christian says like St. Paul: I can do all things in him who
strengthens me; and glorying in his weakness, without fearing
obstacles, without being afraid of enemies, he goes forward on
the arduous but luminous ways of the holy virtues, and aspires
to being perfect like the Heavenly Father is perfect.
J.J. Rousseau, who wrote so much to promote an instruction
devoid of all religious principles and whose books were sadly so
influential in perverting the morals of a people close to us, was
so frightened by the deadly consequences of his irreligious

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