Waldhauser, as he was also called, was a preacher of repentance and righteousness, and attacked spiritual pride, avarice, luxury, usury, and other sins. The effect of his sermons was shown in changed lives. Women, it is reported, laid aside their jewelry and their rich garments, influenced by his warnings. The more he condemned vice and unnecessary adornment the more, he said, did the attachment to him grow. Konrad also used, as he himself informs us, the sharp thorn of the Word against the simony of the clergy, and especially of the monks, and arraigned them for commending spurious relics. “It is folly,” he exclaimed, “to run after the head of St. Barbara when it is found not in Prague but in Prussia.”[1] To the complaints he made against the monks, the archbishop replied that they were outside his jurisdiction and had their own superiors to whom they were amenable.
Irritated by Konrad’s censures and popularity, the Dominicans formulated against him eighteen charges, to which the Augustinians added six more. Four of them ran as follows: Those who receive boys or girls into convents for money are eternally damned. No one in Prague preaches the whole truth. Monks are fat with goods and need no money. Members of orders had been commissioned to kill him.
In reply the preacher publicly declared that the friars were so little like the first members of their orders that they would not only be disowned by them but be stoned. In this also they had changed. In the early days they had been in constant rivalry and strife; now they were united in the effort to break down his usefulness and the influence of the Word of God. A contemporary, Adalbert Ranconis, eulogized Konrad “as a defender of Christ’s truth, an example of religion and sobriety, the mirror of virtue, and preacher of the Gospel.”
- ↑ St. Barbara, a martyr, is said to have been a beautiful maiden whom her heathen father gave over to the authorities and whom they punished with torture and burning. Her legend is very uncertain both as to place and the time of her death. She is the patron saint of the artillery and was invoked against the ravages of tempest and fire.
