Theme: The kingdom of heaven is come in Christ; blessed citizens are humble and show mercy

The Beatitudes are the twelve blessings recounted by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. In the Latin Vulgate, each of these blessings begins with the word beati, which translates to “blessed.” The Latin noun beatitudo was coined by Cicero to describe a state of blessedness and was later incorporated within the chapter headings written for Matthew 5 in various printed versions of the Vulgate. Subsequently, the word was anglicised to “beatytudes” in the Great Bible of 1540, and has, over time, taken on a preferred spelling of beatitudes.