"Drunk with the Devil’s New Wine, the Bishops Sleep Like Pigs Sprawling in the Mire" - by Saint Thomas More

When Christ comes back to His apostles in the Garden of Gethsemani for the third time, there they are buried in sleep, though He commanded them to bear up with Him and to stay awake and pray because of the impending danger.

But Judas, at the same time, was so wide awake and intent on betraying the Lord that the very idea of sleep never entered his mind.

Does not this contrast between the traitor and the apostles present to us a clear and sharp mirror image (as it were), a sad and terrible view of what has happened through the ages from those times even to our own?

Why do not bishops contemplate in this scene their own somnolence?

Since they have succeeded in the place of the apostles, would that they would reproduce their virtues just as eagerly as they embrace their authority and as faithfully as they display their sloth and weariness!

For very many are sleepy and apathetic in sowing virtues among the people and maintaining the truth, while the enemies of Christ in order to sow vices and uproot the faith (that is, insofar as they can, to seize Christ and cruelly crucify Him once again) are wide awake – so much wiser, as Christ says, are the sons of darkness in their generation than the sons of light.

But although this comparison of the sleeping apostles applies very well to those bishops who sleep while the faith and virtue are placed in jeopardy, still it does not apply to all such prelates at all points.

For some of them – alas, far more than I could wish – do not drift into sleep through sadness and grief as the apostles did.

Rather they are numbed and buried in destructive desires; that is, drunk with the new wine of the devil, the flesh, and the world, they sleep like pigs sprawling in the mire.

Excerpt from St Thomas More, De Tristitia Christi, composed in the Tower of London shortly before he was beheaded for the faith.