Why “Nice” is Not a Virtue in the Fight for the Soul of the West
The modern cathedral reeks of cowardice.
Walk into any chancellery or “inclusive” parish today. The visitor finds a religion sterilized for the protection of the regime.
Reflect. Nice is not a virtue.
In the halls of religious power, niceness serves as the lubricant for a graceful retreat from the Truth. The American hierarchy is in a desperate, panting scramble for political correctness.
Decades ago, the backbone of the Faith was traded for a seat at the table of progress, one that now serves the Middle East’s war machinery.
The diagnosis is grim.
Ecclesiastical bureaucrats have chosen to vacate the moral high ground, bartering it away for the regime’s temporary approval and the State’s demands. By abandoning the iron-willed clarity of men like St. Pius X, the hierarchy has embraced the passive-aggressive pettiness of modern sociology.
When Theodor Herzl sought the Vatican’s blessing for a secular Zionist state in 1904, Pius X did not offer a “synodal path” of dialogue. He gave a blunt “Non possumus” —we cannot.
He understood that the Church does not take its cues from modernist political movements, however well-funded or diplomatically urgent they may appear. Today, that iron clarity has been replaced by a valet service that bends over backwards for the State of Israel, a political product of diplomatic appeasement.
Thus, the “permanent things” of T.S. Eliot have been replaced by the fleeting whims of a secular age that worships process over principle.
This is the paradox of the modern prelate: in a frantic attempt to become inclusive, the Truth he was ordained to guard is excluded.
He speaks of appeasement disguised as dialogue. For decades, this hierarchy has been selling its birthright for the thin pottage of secular acceptance. By affirming the expansionist goals of a secular power under the guise of interfaith harmony, these leaders have provided the theological cover for a catastrophe in the Middle East that ignores the natural justice and rights they claim to champion.
The political philosopher Eric Voegelin, who fled Nazi Germany and spent a lifetime diagnosing the spiritual roots of political fanaticism, had a phrase for this: the “Gnostic dream world.”
Eighteen centuries beforehand, St. Irenaeus of Lyons (c. 130–202 AD) had already pinned this neurosis to the wall. He saw that the Gnostic error is as much a psychological pathology as it is a theological heresy. Gnostics possessed a compulsion to reject creation as it is and replace it with a superior world of their own invention, accessible only to those possessing the right knowledge.
Today’s mitered modernists are their faithful heirs, convinced they alone hold the gnosis for social engineering, for Gnostic systems collapse under the weight of their own contradictions.
However, what Irenaeus may not have anticipated is that before the collapse, the Gnostic vision is fully capable of producing—as the necessary price of the imagined paradise—a sequence of terrestrial hells.
H.L. Mencken once noted that the average clergyman is a man who spends his life trying to prove that the tail wags the dog. Today, the tail is the state, and the dog is a neutered Church.
The masses are told that the Faith must evolve to meet the needs of a changing world. This is a lie sold by the moralizers and puritans of the New Left. If the Faith is not an anchor, it is merely driftwood. If it does not stand against the current, it is nothing more than debris.
This theological surrender produces nothing but blood in the desert. When the Church refuses to say “No!” to the regime, it ceases to be a sanctuary and becomes a branch office of the War Department, providing the incense for every new imperial gambit.
These bureaucratic churchmen intone the slogans of “social justice” while ignoring just war theory as an inconvenient relic. The hierarchy has demoted itself. It traded the moral imagination for the sociologist’s ledger, acting as the state’s chaplaincy rather than its check.
The struggle for the nation concerns the principles of survival. A civilization led by men who confuse charity with complicity is terminal.
Bishops and clergy offer platitudes regarding the brotherhood of man, while the American tithe is funneled into projects that hate the Faith. They watch as the working-class sons of their own parishes are sent to die for the interests of the oligarchs, to the mindless applause of Mencken’s “booboisie.”
Recall the Solomonic warning. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom…”
Without such fear, clerics become easy prey for the squalid oligarchs. When the fear of God is obscured, it is replaced by the obsessive fear of suffering, poverty, and the loss of tax-exempt status.
One must ask if the modern prelate still possesses the courage to recognize the apostolic clarity of St. Paul. In Romans 9:6, the architecture of the Faith is made plain: “Not as though the word of God hath miscarried. For all are not Israelites that are of Israel.”
To ignore this is to abandon the Church’s own teaching that it is the True Israel.
No need exists for listening sessions or synodal paths to nowhere. A return to the iron realism of Christian tradition is the only remedy.
While opportunists in the imperial corridor seek an off-ramp from the ruins, these ecclesiastical bureaucrats remain the regime’s most devoted factotums.
The bloody fruit is being harvested in real time. It is seen in the displacement of ancient Christian communities in the East, sacrificed on the altar of a global democracy that has no room for the Cross. It is seen in the hollowed-out towns of the American interior, where the only growth industry is the pharmaceutical numbing of the despair caused by the loss of the “permanent things.”
The response must be unrelenting. The lubrication of cowardice must be rejected. The demand remains: leaders must stop acting as the regime’s spiritual valets.
The Faith was meant to be a fire that consumes the dross of the world, not a night-light for the comfortable. It is time to stop playing the game of diplomatic sensitivity and start speaking the language of the Apostles.
The choice? Defend the hearth and the home with the steel of conviction or accept that the corrupt harvest follows as the only inheritance.
The hour of the feckless diplomat is past. The hour of the Truth—raw, unvarnished, and relentless—is here.
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© 2026 by Brian D. O’Leary. All rights reserved.