1. But I said: If you recall what was discussed concerning holy priests, you have received a sufficient answer. For in the teachers of the Church, as we have already said above, there ought to be both censure, that they may reprove; and patience, that they may strongly bear those unwilling to be amended—satisfying the apostolic command, who charged Timothy, saying: Reprove, beseech, rebuke, in all patience and doctrine (2 Tim. iv, 2). As though he said: Reprove equals, beseech elders, rebuke juniors. But for this reason he added: In all patience and doctrine: because one gently corrected shows reverence to the one correcting him; but one offended by the harshness of excessive rebuke receives neither the rebuke nor salvation. Likewise in another place the same apostle says:
You who are stronger, bear the infirmities of the weaker (Rom. xv, 1). They therefore bear with equanimity, as the weak, those whom, after chastising, they have not been able to amend. Accordingly, since it is neither expedient to chide all, nor to treat all gently, holy priests know and discern whom they ought to correct with tempered severity, and whom to bear with priestly magnanimity; and therefore, of all whom by God's grace they cure, they look not to their will but to their profit. Finally, some who unbecomingly seek to be honored—those for whom they know it is not expedient—they pass over, not from the vice of any envy, but by the counsel of a deep prudence; and others who desire to lie hidden they honor, that they may open to them an entrance to greater advances.
Those whom they judge able to bear rebuke they chastise; and the impatient of reproof, as the sickly, they handle softly—not flattering them because they are such, but having compassion on the infirmities of such people, if perhaps they cannot otherwise be healed. 2. For the rest, if the weak who cannot be cured by applied rebuke are deprived of the communion of the Church, either, overburdened beyond measure by an intolerable mass of sadness, they sink down, and flee the faces of all the saints, through whom they might be restored to God;
or assuredly, if they have been exasperated, they leap forth to every shamelessness of sinning, and whatever evil they were secretly doing they will perpetrate publicly, fallen by the despair of recovering salvation into such madness that they turn the serious words of those correcting them into deadly jests with shameless wit, and, evil-tongued against themselves, feed—by the very boasting of their own baseness—the malevolent merriment of those who live basely. For this reason, therefore, they are to be borne with tender mercy who cannot be reproved because of their weakness. And in truth, if you strike into the sinner a wholesome shame while you blush for him, and pour into him, with a pious compassion of soul, the shame which you take upon yourself for his sins;
you easily repress in him all license of sinning, and you take from him all the shamelessness that is the encourager of licentious baseness. Then shame, the guardian of integrity, will adorn his manners, so that what was foul to him before may please him, when he himself was foul; and what pleased him before may grow foul to him, when he himself was displeasing to all good men. He will follow holy men by loving them, and by following them he will gradually be conformed to their likeness through the amendment of his former life, so that, just as it was laborious for him to come out into the height of virtue, so it may be unseemly to descend again into the vices which he rejoices to have got rid of. For just as virtue is burdensome to the vicious man, so to the friend of virtue vicious pleasure is bitter.