A Parting Blessing

With all Our heart, dear sons, We invoke heaven's choicest blessings on you and on your families. The Church has always blessed you in a particular manner, and in many ways has brought your working year into her liturgical year. We invoke these blessings upon the work of your hands, from which the holy altar of God receives the bread and wine. May the Lord give you, in the words of Holy Scripture, "the dew of heaven, and of the fatness of the earth, abundance of corn and wine!" (Gen., XXVII:28) May your lands, like the fertile Etruscan fields between Fiesole and Arezzo, so greatly admired by Livy, "be rich in grain and cattle and an abundance of all things," "frumenti ac pecoris et omnium copia rerum opulenti" (Livy, Ab Urbe Condita 1. XXII, cap. 3). With these sentiments and these wishes We impart to you and to all those dear to you Our paternal Apostolic Blessing.