I have a special request, if there is a priest who reads this regularly. The area we live in is having a mini drought and temperatures have been stuck in the mid to high nineties for a month. This is an agricultural area and the temperature has been five to ten degrees higher than the annual average for all of June and part of May and the forecast is for no end in sight.

I just had a conversation with my landlady, Annamaria, and she said people are starting to worry. The farmers are worried about losing whole crops, or alternately, spending so much extra money on irrigation that they’re going to lose the value of the crops.

People around here aren’t wealthy, for the most part. This is pretty much just a working class farm town, with people living their whole lives in houses they grew up in. (Annamaria was telling me about harvesting the wheat with her dad thirty years ago with hand tools!) So there’s not a lot of extra room for this kind of economic trouble.

If there is a priest in the house, could I request a special Mass to be said for the needs and intentions of the people of San Martino in Campo? For rain, and for a good harvest?

If so, drop a note into the commbox. I won’t publish it if you don’t want me to, but I’ll send you the stipend by Paypal.

Thanks.

O God, in Whom we live and move and have our being,

grant us rain, in due abundance, that,

being sufficiently helped with temporal gifts,

we may seek with more confidence those that are eternal.

Through Christ, our Lord. Amen.

(From a novena in honour of St. Isidore, Patron of Farmers by National Catholic Rural Life Conference, National Catholic Rural Life Conference)