His sad time each year was the Carnival, those days of disorder and licence
which, like a torrent, carry away into excesses of one sort or another even
the staunchest and most fervent in their piety. He felt, indeed, like Job
of old, who offered sacrifices and prayers, and afflicted both body and
soul with fasts and mortifications, while his children were passing their
time in revellings and banquetings.
As our Blessed Father was all things to all men, and weak with the weak, so
he also burned with the scandalised; and who would not be scandalised to
see the Pagan festival of the Bacchanalia celebrated among Christians? For
this very reason, as we know, the name of God is blasphemed by many, and
the Catholic religion unjustly blamed, as if it permitted what it cannot
prevent, as if it commanded what it tolerates with reluctance, as if it
ordered what it detests and declaims against by the mouth of its preachers.
Perhaps you would like to hear the words in which our Blessed Father pours
forth his lamentations over this period of the year, so full of disorder
and confusion.
"I must tell you," he says, "that now I have come to my sorrowful time.
From the Epiphany even to Lent my heart is full of strange sensations.
Miserable and detestable as I am, I am weighed down with grief to see the
loss of so much devotion, I mean the falling off of so many souls. These
two last Sundays I have found our communions diminished by one-half. That
has grieved me very much, for even if those who made them do not give way
to sin, why, and for what, do they now omit them? For nothing at all--out
of mere vanity, it is that which grieves me."