Wicked life of priests the worst kind of heresy.
‘In these times also we experience much opposition from the laity, but they are not so opposed to us as we are to ourselves. Nor does their opposition do us so much hurt as the opposition of our own wicked lives, which are opposed to God and to Christ; for He said, “He that is not with me is against me.” We are troubled in these days also by heretics—men mad with strange folly;—but this heresy of theirs is not so pestilential and pernicious to us and the people as the vicious and depraved lives of the clergy, which, if we may believe St. Bernard, is a species of heresy, and the greatest and most pernicious of all; for that holy father, preaching in a certain convocation to the priests of his time, in his sermon spake in these words:—“There are many who are catholic in their speaking and preaching who are very heretics in their actions, for what heretics do by their false doctrines these men do by their evil examples—they seduce the people and lead them into error of life—and they are by so much worse than heretics as actions are stronger than words.” These things said Bernard, that holy father of so great and ardent spirit, against the faction of wicked priests of his time; by which words he plainly shows that there be two kinds of heretical pravity—one of perverse doctrine, the other of perverse living—of which the latter is the greater and more pernicious; and this reigns in the Church, to the miserable destruction of the Church, her priests living after a worldly and not after a priestly fashion. Wherefore do you fathers, you priests, and all of you of the clergy, awake at length, and rise up from this your sleep in this forgetful world: and being awake, at length listen to Paul calling unto you, “Be ye not conformed to this world.”
‘This concerning the first part.
Reformation.
‘Now let us come to the second—concerning Reformation.
‘“But be ye reformed in the newness of your minds.” What Paul commands us secondly is, that we should “be reformed into a new mind;” that we should savour the things which are of God; that we should be reformed to those things which are contrary to what I have been speaking of—i.e. to humility, sobriety, charity, spiritual occupations; just as Paul wrote to Titus, “Denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly in this present world.”
Must begin with the bishops.
‘But this reformation and restoration in ecclesiastical affairs must needs begin with you, our fathers, and then afterwards descend upon us your priests and the whole clergy. For you are our chiefs—you are our examples of life. To you we look as waymarks for our direction. In you and in your lives we desire to read, as in living books, how we ourselves should live. Wherefore, if you wish to see our motes, first take the beams out of your own eyes; for it is an old proverb, “Physician heal thyself.” Do you, spiritual doctors, first assay that medicine for the purgation of morals, and then you may offer it to us to taste of it also.
Existing laws must be enforced.
‘The way, moreover, by which the Church is to be reformed and restored to a better condition is not to enact any new laws (for there are laws enough and to spare). As Solomon says, “There is no new thing under the sun.” The diseases which are now in the Church were the same in former ages, and there is no evil for which the holy fathers did not provide excellent remedies; there are no crimes in prohibition of which there are not laws in the body of the Canon Law. The need, therefore, is not for the enactment of new laws and constitutions, but for the observance of those already enacted. Wherefore, in this your congregation, let the existing laws be produced and recited which prohibit what is evil, and which enjoin what is right.