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6th Pastoral Letter of the Bishop of Acqui

participate amply in it, and to employ all your zeal so that it too
may grow in this school of religion.
We turn first of all to you, parents and heads of families.
You are the first teachers, and your lips, as a great Doctor of the
Church writes, are the first books with which this salutary
school begins: libri sunt labia parentum. Your children have the
image of God stamped on their soul. It is up to you to highlight,
so to speak, the outlines of this image; to form in them a good
conscience, to teach them the holy name of God, that infinite
Being who drew all things out of nothing, who is our first
principle and ultimate end. It is up to you to teach them to know
Jesus Christ, the immense love that he had and still has for us,
his doctrine, his example, and his blessings. It is up to you to
educate your children, from their first years, to observe the
divine law, to recognize in you and in every other superior the
higher authority of God, and to be just and charitable with
everyone. Oh! what a moving picture: a Christian mother who
turns the eyes and hands of her child to heaven, teaching him to
invoke our common Father who is in heaven, our Divine Savior
and Lord Jesus, our heavenly Mother Mary, who exercises his
virginal heart in the virtues of faith, hope and charity infused in
his soul by God in Holy Baptism.
It has been said that the fate of a man rests on the knees of
his mother. That is true, because the good seed planted at the
right time by a virtuous mother in her children will not fail to
bear good fruit. It may perhaps be unfruitful for some time
because it is stifled by passions at that age when such instincts
rise tempestuously and boiling, but which will develop later
when circumstances are more propitious and the years more
mature producing the desired fruit copiously. Does history not
give us very consoling examples of men who had given
themselves to every error and every vice, who recalling the
beautiful years of their innocence, and finally entering into
themselves, deplore their past deviations and come back to the

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