57. When persecution rages, the strong, who are in the body of the Church, fail as it were like bones. — If we attend to the history itself, the cause is plain, since a multitude of worms, teeming through the folds of his ulcers, was mangling the holy man's body. But if we search out the mystery of the allegory, what is designated by bones if not the strong ones in the body of the holy Church? Who, as it were by their own strength, hold the members together, while they steadfastly bear the ways of the weak. But when the fervour of the last tribulation has grown high against her, in the night his bone is pierced with pains, because sometimes even those very ones who seemed to hold others to the faith, being overcome by torments, themselves flow down to perfidy. He says, then: In the night my bone is pierced with pains. As though he openly said:
Pressed down by the darkness of tribulation, they are worn away by affliction, so that even those who once possessed in me the vigour of fortitude now bear, as it were, a certain opening for fear. Well is it said: And those who devour me do not sleep; for the malignant spirits, who consume all who are carnal within the Church, are the less able to rest from temptation the more that they are weighed down by no burden of the flesh. But since the persecutors of the holy Church are exceedingly perverse, would that they were few! There follows: