Vain and Proud Preachers

May 16, 2026

My brothers, many devote all their care and diligence to acquiring knowledge; they forget their holy vocation and allow themselves to be drawn, in mind and body, away from the path of humility and holy prayer.

When they have preached to the people and know that some have been edified or converted to repentance, they become proud of it and take occasion to exalt themselves because of such work and the benefit gained by others.

Yet they have rather preached to their own condemnation and to their own harm; in truth, they have done no good work there. They have only been instruments of those through whom the Lord has truly produced such fruit.

Those whom they imagine they have edified and led to repentance by their learning and preaching, the Lord edifies and converts through the prayers and tears of certain holy brothers, poor, humble, and without appearance, though these same holy brothers most often do not know it. For God wills that they know nothing of it, lest they take occasion from it to become proud.

These, my brothers, are the true knights of the Round Table, who hide themselves in deserts and secluded places in order to devote themselves more carefully to prayer and meditation, weeping for their own sins and those of others, living in simplicity, walking in humility; their holiness is known to God and sometimes unknown to brothers and to men.

The souls of these religious will be presented to God by the angels; then their Lord will show them the fruit and the reward of their labors, those many souls saved by their examples, their prayers, and their tears. He will say to them:

“Because you have been faithful in small things, I will set you over greater ones. Others have preached and labored, borrowing their words from their own wisdom and learning, and I have worked fruits of salvation through your merits. Therefore receive the reward of their labors and the fruit of your merits, the eternal kingdom, which you have seized by the force of your humility, your simplicity, your prayers, and your tears.”

And thus these men, bearing in their arms their sheaves, that is, the fruits and merits of their holy humility and simplicity, will enter, full of happiness and gladness, into the joy of the Lord. Those, on the contrary, whose application has been limited to knowing and showing others the way of salvation without doing anything for themselves, will be found at the tribunal of Jesus Christ naked and empty-handed; their sheaves will be only sheaves of confusion, shame, and sorrow.

Then the truth of holy humility, holy simplicity, holy prayer, holy poverty—which is our vocation—will be exalted, glorified, and made manifest with brilliance. This truth, which, puffed up by the breath of their vain knowledge, they never ceased to undermine by their lives and the frivolous discourses of their learning, calling this truth itself a falsehood, and, like the blind, persecuting those who walked in its paths.

Then the erroneous and deceitful opinions that had guided their steps, which they had preached as truth, and by means of which they had cast so many men into the pit of blindness—these opinions, I say, will end in pain, confusion, and shame, and they themselves, with their dark opinions, will be plunged into outer darkness with the spirits of darkness.