ABSTRACT
IT is all too common for the rash impiety of sacrilegious minds to conjure up all types of evil and to carry them out sadistically in opposition to divine reverence and its ministers. At first they totally abolish holy worship or, by pillaging its possessions, obstruct it to such a degree that eventually they seize all the property of the Church and her clerics, and turn it to the use and inheritance of the laity. 1 They do not or will not realize that it is a crueller sort of doom to take away the subsistence that a man needs and to kill him with wretched, lingering starvation, than to put him to death by a swift, though harsh, dispatch by rope or sword, even though he is bereft and bare of any comfort. Indeed, to soothe itself their wickedness runs to such deep falsehood that they cunningly say: ‘It is not that we are driving the clerics out of the churches, or the monks or nuns from their cloisters. We are only giving their possessions to the public purse and the crown, so that nothing further may be left for removal by others, and by increasing these funds new alms may be distributed.’ 2 Those men shall see how execrable and loathsome this is, as they prepare disgrace and everlasting torment for themselves through their damnable villainy, and for their stock and descendants eternal want, which by the law of heredity lingers in the home of the impious as leprosy does in the house of the leper. 3 This is certain also from what is said by Theodoric, king of the Goths, concerning the freedom of the clergy, namely that anyone who removes their scant possessions from ministers and cloisters shall suffer the same poverty in the courts of princes. 4
