List of points

You are creating an artificial climate around yourself, characterised by suspicion and a lack of trust. For when you speak, you give the impression of someone playing chess: you say each word thinking four moves ahead.

Notice that the Gospel, when describing the wary and hypocritical character of the scribes and Pharisees, relates that they asked Jesus questions and put certain problems to him ut caperent eum in sermone — to twist his words! Flee from such behaviour.

If you are annoyed at being told the truth, then… why do you ask?

—Is it perhaps that you want to be answered with your own “truth” so your errant ways can be justified?

These people, he said sadly, do not have the mind of Christ, but the mask of Christ… That is why they lack Christian judgement, cannot grasp the truth, and yield no fruit.

We, the sons of God, must not forget that the Master said: “Whoever listens to you, listens to me…” —That is why we have to try to be Christ: never a caricature of him.

Hypocrisy always leads those who cultivate it to a life of bitter and grudging mortification.

Herod said: “Go and enquire carefully for the child, and when you have found him, bring me back word, so that I too may come and worship him.” Faced by proposals such as this, let us ask the Holy Spirit to keep us from the “protection” or the “promise of good things” of people who appear well-intentioned.

—We will not lack the light of the Paraclete if, as the Wise Men did, we seek the truth and speak with sincerity.

Are there people who protest because you say things clearly? Perhaps they live with a troubled conscience, and they need to cover it up in that way.

—You should continue to behave in the same way, to help them to change.

While you continue to interpret in bad faith the intentions of your neighbour, you have no right to demand that people should be understanding with you.

You are constantly talking about the need to change and reform things. Good… Reform yourself! For you need it badly, and already you will have begun the great reform.

In the meantime, I shall not be putting too much faith in your proclamations of reform.

There are some who are so pharisaical that… they are scandalized when others repeat precisely what their own lips have let fall.

You are such a busybody that it seems as if your only concern were to dive into the lives of your neighbours. And when, at last, you stumble upon an upright man of good will and energy who has stopped you in your tracks, you complain in public as if he had offended you.

—Your shamelessness and deformed conscience…, have led you thus far. And that goes for many others.

In one move, you have tried to appropriate the “honesty” of the true opinion and the ignoble “advantages” of the opposite opinion…

—That, in any language, is called duplicity.

How good they are!!… They are ready to “excuse” what is only worthy of praise.