Letters152 Letter CLII. To pope innocent, on behalf of the bishop of Troves. (Circa A.D. 1135)

The indiscipline of the clergy increases with the slothful indulgence of the Bishops. The Bishop of Troyes is hated by a part of his clergy because he has corrected them.

The evil living of the clergy, the mother of which is Episcopal negligence, is everywhere disturbing and weakening the Church. The Bishops give what is holy to dogs, and cast pearls before swine, who turn again and rend them. But it is only right that they should have to suffer from those that they foster. They do not correct those whom they enrich with the goods of the Church, and therefore they are grieved and wearied with their misconduct. The clergy are made wealthy from other men's labours; they eat the fruit of the earth and give no money for it, and their iniquity cometh from their own fat (Ps. Ixxiii. 7, VULG.). The old saying of the Scripture exactly applies to them of the present day, The people sat down to eat and to drink, and rose up to play (1 Cor. x. 7). A mind that has accustomed itself to delights, and that has not trained itself with the disciplinary rod, contracts many a stain. And what is more, if you attempt to rub off its long-standing rust, they will not suffer you to touch it with even the tips of your fingers; but as it is written, Jeshurun waxed fat, and kicked (Deut. xxxii. 15). False witnesses have risen up, men whose delight is ever to carp at the lives of others and neglect their own. Your son supplicates for the Bishop, whose sole fault in this quarrel, unless I am mistaken, has been that he has rebuked the clergy for their evil lives. Thus much for the Bishop; now let me offer excuses for myself. My father knows that I did not receive before the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin his gracious letter, in which he preferred to courteously entreat me to come to him, when he might have ordered me. And so I do not say, I have bought five yoke of oxen, or I have bought a piece of ground, or I have married a wife; but I confess simply, what, indeed, you are not ignorant of, that I am feeding my children with milk, and therefore I do not see how I can leave them without running the risk of causing scandal, or leaving them exposed to danger.