Centuries ago, my ancestors left this land: this beautiful enchanted land, its hills and fields, its trees and their fruit, its rivers, its flavors and smells, flowers, sea, stones, bricks - and immemorial churches made of stones and bricks, and the unmistakable sounds of their bells. They left it never to come back.
The natural duty of a soldier to his nation is in great measure the defense of the soil where the bones of his ancestors are buried. Love for country is also devotion to the sacred abode of one's forefathers. Yet... what can one do when, going back just a few centuries, the bones, the sacred abode, the remains are elsewhere, forever hidden from sight, but known only to God?
Can there be a loyalty of mind and a loyalty of tears?... If so, dear land of my ancestors, my tears now fall on the land, rivers and sea on which the tears of those men and women so many years ago fell. God bought you forever with the Blood of His Son, which faithful Priests elevate in oblation and adoration, in the Latin Mass you have known from your earliest days, even under oppression and in times of persecution: may He, on the day of His coming, find in you more justice than "in the land of Sodom and Gomorrah" (cf. Mt. x, 11-15).
