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 this minority is showing signs of decadence and dissolution. For it religion is no longer the directing force of life, but a cold observance of traditional formulas and precepts. The men are reduced to a handful, the women go on slowly diminishing, and the young people are becoming ever more refractory to religious training.

Some have already announced the death of Catholicism, others have bemoaned its miserable condition. We do neither. It is not every crisis that brings death. At times an organism, when once the crisis is past and it has been purified of those elements which are alien and hostile to its nature, emerges to a more vigorous life. And we, who still feel all the riches and the inexhaustible power of Christianity in virtue of an intimate experience which overcomes every human argument to the contrary, have, in answer to your paternal call, girt ourselves with confidence to the task of imparting to the