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7th Pastoral Letter of the Bishop of Acqui

does not demand long prayers, austere fasts, or great penances.
It asks of its members only one brief prayer a day, an Our
Father and a Hail Mary with a pious invocation to the glorious
Apostle of India, St. Francis Xavier, and it allows the
application, once and for all, of that prayer which every
Christian usually says every morning and evening to the God
who created and preserves him. Every week, it asks only a
small alms which the poor themselves, if they are pious, do not
refuse to those who are poorer than they.
This great work of charity, in which we can easily take part
with our prayers and our alms, is also fruitful in the great good
we can receive, because our participation gives us a share in all
the fruits, all the merits, and all the glory of the Work in its
Apostles, its Confessors, and its Martyrs.
Above all, by cooperating with God in the communication
of the light of faith to those unhappy people who are still buried
in the darkness of error, we will make this light shine ever more
splendidly in our own soul. This is what our Brothers in the
Episcopate also think when they express this common
conviction: "The small alms that you consecrate to the Work of
the Propagation of the Faith", writes the Bishop of Valenza to
his Diocese, "will obtain for you abundant graces, and the most
precious of all: the preservation of the faith in your country".
"The preservation of the faith among us", writes another Bishop,
"will be the exchange and the reward for the efforts that we will
make to propagate it elsewhere"; and we would like to add, not
only its preservation but also an increase in faith, and of its
fruits, because God "multiplies the seed that we plant and
increases its fruits", as the Apostle St. Paul assures us:
multiplicabit semen vestrum et augebit incrementa frugum
iustitiae vestrae (2 Cor. IX. 10). There is also a beautiful
thought from a Missionary Bishop: "Mercy always returns to
where it came from". That is what St. Thomas teaches with
these words: "Nothing impels God's mercy more than the mercy

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