Originally published at The Catholic Thing
In those days there shall rise up a people without understanding, proud, covetous, untrusty, and deceitful, that shall eat the sins of the people, holding a certain order of foolish devotion, under the feigned cloak of beggary, preferring themselves above all others, by their feigned devotion, arrogant understanding, and pretended holiness; walking without shamefacedness, or the fear of God; inventing many new mischiefs, being strong and stout: but this order shall be accursed of all wise men and faithful Christians; they shall cease from labor, and give themselves over unto idleness; choosing rather to live through flattery, and by begging. Moreover, they shall together study how they may perversely resist the teachers of the truth and slay them together with the noblemen, how to seduce and deceive the nobility for the necessity of their living and the pleasures of this world. For the devil will graft in them Four principal vices in the friars’ four principal vices; that is to say, flattery, envy, hypocrisy, and slander: flattery, that they may have large gifts given them: envy, when they see gifts given unto others, and not unto them: hypocrisy, that by false dissimulation, they may please men: detraction, that they may
