The Simple Life

"More than others, you live in permanent contact with nature: in material contact, by the fact that your life is passed in places as yet far removed from the excesses of an artificial civilization and is also wholly directed towards producing from the soil, under the beneficent rays of our Heavenly Father's sun, the abundant riches that his loving hand has hidden therein; in contact that is profoundly social also, because your families are not only communities of consumers but, more especially, communities of producers. From the fact that your life work is so profoundly and at the same time so generally and completely based upon the family, and therefore so fully in conformity with the order of nature, arises the economic strength and, in critical times, the capacity for resistance, with which you are endowed, and also your oft-demonstrated importance in the development of justice and order, public as well as private, throughout the whole people. Finally, the stability of your family life is the reason of the indispensable function you are called upon to exercise as the fount and bulwark of unsullied moral and religious life, as well as the reservoir of men, healthy in mind and body, for all the professions, for the Church and for the State." - Pope Pius XII, speaking to Italian farmers