“The cry of the wretched ascends from the very precincts of that gloom, and yet no one among those sitting on thrones in your name hears it; the lamentation of the sorrowful does not reach the ears of those who speak of your teachings at the pulpit. The lambs that were sent for the sake of the word of life have changed into wolves whose fangs rend the flanks of those sheep that you hugged with your own arms. The words of life that you revealed from the breast of God have been hidden in books, and their place has been taken by a terrifying clamor from which souls recoil, trembling, in dread.

“Jesus, they have raised for the glorification of their own names churches and cathedrals, adorning them with woven silk and refined gold, leaving the bodies of your chosen ones, the poor, naked in icy alleyways. They have filled the atmosphere with the fumes of incense and the flames of candles, and left the stomachs of the believers in your divinity empty of bread. They have crowded the air with chants and praises, but heard not the cry of the orphan or the sobs of the widow.

“Come again, Jesus the Living, and expel the merchants of religion from your temple, for they have reduced it to a grotto where vipers invent their tricks and chicanery. Come and call these Caesars to account, for they have pilfered what belongs to the weak and to God. Come, and look at the vineyards that you planted with your own right hand, for worms have eaten their stems and vagabonds have crushed their bunches of grapes. Come and look at those you entrusted with the peace, for they have divided into factions and become enemies of one another and warred amongst themselves, and the casualties of their war were none other than our sorrowing souls and our exhausted hearts.

“In their feast days and celebrations they boldly raise their voices, saying, ‘Glory be to God in the highest, and on earth, peace, and to the people, joy.’ But does it honor your heavenly Father for his name to be pronounced by sinful lips and lying tongues? And is there peace on earth when the children of misery expend their powers in the fields under the harsh sun in order to feed the mouths of the powerful and to fill the bellies of the tyrant? Do the people possess joy when the wretched look with defeated eyes at death the way the vanquished looks on a savior?

“What is peace, sweet Jesus? Is it in the eyes of children leaning on the breasts of hungry mothers in darkened, freezing huts? Or is it in needy bodies sleeping on stone beds, wishing for the slop that the priests of the monastery throw to their fattened pigs, but which they cannot have? What is joy, beautiful Jesus? Is it for a prince to buy with spare silver the abilities of men and the honor of women, and for us to be silent and remain slaves in spirit and in the flesh to those who dazzle our eyes with the shimmer of their golden medallions or the gleam of their gems and satiny robes? Or is it for us to cry out, recognizing our oppression and making our plaint, such that they send their hired men to attack us with swords, on fleet steeds, trampling the bodies of our women and little children and getting the earth drunk with our blood?