Thanksgiving
November 22, 2001

La Salle Vietnam House is happy and honored
hosting the Brothers of the Provincialate - SF
to the Thanksgiving Lunch on Nov. 18, 2001

THANKSGIVING PROCLAMATION
by Abraham Lincoln in 1863

     It is the duty of nations as well as of men to own their dependence
upon the overruling power of God; to confess their sins and transgressions
in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead
to mercy and pardon; and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the
Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations are blessed whose God is the Lord.

     We know that by His divine law, nations, like individuals, are
subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world.  May we not
justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war which now desolates the
land may be a punishment inflicted upon us for presumptous sins, to the
needful end of our national reformation as a whole people?

     We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven; we
have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have
grown in numbers, wealth and power as no other nation has ever grown.

     But we have forgotten God.  We have forgotten the gracious land which
preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and
we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all
these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our
own.  Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too
self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace,
too proud to pray to the God that made us.

     It has seemed to me fit and proper that God should be solemnly,
reverently, and gratefully acknowleged, as with one heart and one voice,
by the whole American people.  I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in
every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those
who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last
Thursday of November as a day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent
Father Who dwelleth in the heavens.

Abraham Lincoln,
President of the United States