1. I had not yet finished the discourse on holy priests, from which I was endeavoring to say more, when behold, one of our brethren, coming in to me, curiously asked what I was dictating. When I had had it recited to him: There is no doubt, he said, that all bishops ought to be such as your discourse has described, and that there are now among us many full of priestly goods, such as you have truly preached; but since it is proved to belong to their office to reprove the unruly with priestly authority, to teach the ignorant, to refute those who contradict sound doctrine—why is it that this care of theirs is not extended to all? Why do they not chastise others also with like authority?
I mean those who, as though converted, cast off nothing of their former manners, changed not in mind but in garb; not in act, but in appearance. 2. These are they who, content to have renounced the world only in word and not in deed, live in worldly fashion, and hide their vices under the empty profession of a better life, and, cloaked under the name of an imaginary religion, take up the reputation of virtue in place of virtue: they preach great things, yet do them not; they accuse vices, yet lay them not aside; they pretend publicly to be displeased with themselves for what they secretly commit; they are eager to seem great, not to become so; they praise those by whose proclamation they desire to be praised; they fast that they may sell, for ruinous praises, the pallor of their countenance.
Prompt to rebuke others, they do not suffer themselves to be rebuked by anyone, even lightly. To the public face they feign patience, and in their heart they hide the venom of wrath, ready to do harm when they have found a time for harming: negligent of their own deeds, they become, with insolent license, censors of others. Shamelessly they attach themselves to consecrated virgins and to widows, to whom they are glued with such great affection that they would more easily withdraw from the communion of the Church (which is also a sin even to speak of) than from communion with them. And these men, even if perhaps they do not sin with them, nevertheless, by furnishing matter for an evil suspicion concerning themselves, defile their own life with the stains of a sinister reputation. 3.
I say nothing of those who walk along with a flowing, almost staggering motion of the body, their garments trailing down to their heels, and, somehow billowing with wavering swayings of their sides, betray the dissoluteness of their souls by their footsteps nodding with a sinuous mobility. Who could endure those who, presenting the image of a shadowy honesty, take up the causes of orphans and widows, as though to protect them with feigned piety, to this end—that they may add their resources to their own, and, made rich out of the poor, or richer out of the rich, may by wickedness heap up their slender estate: so that, when they have been made more lavish by an overflowing patrimony, the material for the pleasure of their gullet may never fail? These, then, of such a kind—why do those not reprove them who have received from God the power of reproving?
aNonverentur, nefortecumtamflagitioseviveniibusparcunt, videanturprobarequaefaciunt? Quidquodeosetiamadofficiumclericatusadmittunt, et (prohnefas!) quasiparumsitquodtalesdissimulataseveritatenonincrepant, insuperethonorant ?
Do they not fear, lest perhaps, by sparing those who live so shamefully, they may seem to approve what these do? What of the fact that they even admit such men to the office of the clergy, and—oh, the shame!—as though it were too little that they do not, with dissembled severity, rebuke such men, they moreover even honor them?