On the great poet

 
If then Dante owes so great a part of his fame and greatness to the Catholic Faith, let that one example, to say nothing of others, suffice to show the falseness of the assertion that obedience of mind and heart to God is a hindrance to genius, whereas indeed it incites and elevates it. Let it show also the harm done to the cause of learning and civilization by a desire to banish all idea of religion from public instruction. Deplorable indeed is the system prevalent today of educating young students as if God did not exist and without the least reference to the supernatural. In some places the “sacred poem” is not kept outside the schools, is indeed numbered among the books to be studied specially; but it does not bring to the young students that “vital nourishment” which it should do because through the principle of the “lay school” they are not disposed towards the truths of the Faith as they should be. Heaven grant that this may be the fruit of the [sixth] Dante Centenary: that wherever literary instruction is given the great poet may be held in due honor and that he himself may be for the pupils the teacher of Christian doctrine, he whose one purpose in his poem was “to raise mortals from the state of misery,” that is from the state of sin, “and lead them to the state of happiness,” that is of divine grace.