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Chapter 10

God's Son speaks these words, saying: ”O, Rome, you repay me badly for my many favors. I am God, who created all things, and I manifested my great love through the harsh death of my body, a death I willed to endure for the salvation of souls. Three are the paths on which I wished to come to you, and truly you wished to betray me on all of them. You hung a large rock overhead to crush me on the first path. You placed a sharp spear on the second path to block my way to you. You dug a moat in the third path for me to fall into unawares and drown. What I have said now should not be understood in a physical but a spiritual sense. I am speaking to the inhabitants of Rome who act in this way but not to my friends who reject their works.

The first path by which I am accustomed to enter the human heart is the fear of God. They have hung over it an enormous rock, that is, the great presumption of a hardened heart that does not fear the judge whom none can withstand. They say in their hearts: 'Should the fear of God come to me, the presumption of my heart shall crush it.' The second path by which I come is the inspiration of divine counsel, which often also comes through preaching and teaching. People block me from this path with a spear through their delight in sinning against my precepts and through their firm resolution to persevere in wickedness until they can no longer keep it up. This is the spear that blocks God's grace from coming to them. The third path is the Holy Spirit's enlightenment in each person's heart by which people can understand and ponder the nature and greatness of what I have done for them and what I suffered for them. They dig a deep moat for me by saying in their hearts: 'I love my pleasure more than his charity. I'm satisfied by just thinking about the enjoyments of the present life.' So they drown divine love and all my deeds, as it were, in a deep moat.
The inhabitants of Rome do all this to me, and certainly show it in their words and deeds. They count my words and deeds for nothing, cursing and insulting me and my Mother and my saints both in jest and in earnest, whether happy or angry, instead of giving me thanks. They do not live according to Christian customs, as the Holy Church commands, having no more love for me than the demons. The demons prefer to endure their wretchedness forever and hold on to their own wickedness rather than to see me and join me in perennial glory. These are the people who refuse to receive my body, which is consecrated from the altar bread, as I myself established, and whose reception is a great help against the devil's temptations. How wretched they are who scorn such help while they are still healthy and reject it like poison, because they do not wish to refrain from sin!
I shall now come by a way unknown to them through the power of my divinity, bringing vengeance on the scorners of my humanity. And just as they have prepared three obstacles on their paths to prevent my coming to them, so too I shall prepare three other obstacles for them, the bitterness of which they shall know and taste both dead and alive. My rock is a sudden and unforeseen death that shall crush them so that all their merriments will be left behind, and their souls will be forced to come alone to my judgment. My spear is my justice, and it shall separate them from me so that they will never taste of the one who redeemed them and will never behold the beauty of the one who created them. My moat is the shadowy darkness of hell into which they shall fall, living there in everlasting wretchedness. All my angels in heaven and all the saints shall condemn them, and all the demons and all the souls in hell shall curse them.
Yet I take note of them, and I am saying this about those people with the disposition described above, whether they are religious or secular clergy or laymen or women or their sons and daughters old enough to understand that God forbids every sin, but who nonetheless voluntarily get caught up in sins and shut out God's love and belittle the fear of him.

My will is still the same as it was when I hung upon the cross. I am the same now as I was then, when I forgave the thief his sins upon his asking for mercy and opened for him the gates of heaven. For the other thief, however, who despised me, I unlocked hell's barriers, and there he remains, forever tormented for his sins.”

St. Agnes's words of praise and blessing to the glorious Virgin herself, and about how she prays to the Virgin for the daughter, and about the answer of the Lord and of his sweet Virgin and their consoling words to the bride, and about this world as symbolized by a pot.

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