God isn't nice

The cult of niceness is destroying the virtue of love

Velazquez’s Crucifixion of Christ. It isn’t nice. It’s love.

St. Augustine teaches, “If you believe what you like in the gospel and reject what you don’t like, it is not the gospel you believe, but yourself.” The problem he describes is, of course, the false prophecy opposed to the Christian era, one that’s particularly acute in modernity. Because of our ego and radical individualism, we’ve been conditioned to believe that we get to be arbiters of the truth and whatever current feelings the in-crowd is signaling have priority over the plain teaching of the Church.

False prophecy, Our Lord warns, arrives in sheep’s clothing. In other words, it’s seductive. It seems right. It seems honorable. I cannot help but notice that false prophecy is most effective when it disguises itself and weaponizes virtue. It takes our instincts, such as they are, to be kind and agreeable and turns them against. us. False prophecy does this again and again: It isn’t nice to be so prudish about the covenant of marriage and who can or cannot be married. It isn’t nice to offer Holy Communion only to Catholics. It isn’t nice to exclude women from the priesthood. And so on.

A few weeks ago in my homily, I insisted that talking about and maintaining a strong belief in the existence of hell is actually the nice thing to do. Deacon Pieper and I were talking after and he mentioned that the background to the word, “nice” is quite interesting. I did some research because I was curious (“curious” is another word that has a conflicted background), and it turns out the word “nice” comes from the Latin nescius, a compound word meaning “no knowledge.” A nice person was thought to be foolish and ignorant. It was only in the 18th century it shifted to meaning a person who is agreeable. Notice, even with this shift, that to be always agreeable isn’t necessarily a compliment, because it indicates a person who lacks knowledge, has no firm morals, and so goes along with others. It was only in the modern era that this sort of lack of opinion came to be considered commendable.

Monsignor Charles Pope comments on the origins of the word “nice,” writing, “To the modern world, in which ‘pseudo-tolerance’ is one of the only ‘virtues’ left, being nice is about the only commandment left. It seems that much will be forgiven a person just so long as he is ‘nice.’ And little will be accepted from a person who is not thought of as ‘nice.’” I agree with him and am always, for instance, surprised how many parents will, without a word of objection, tolerate the morally harmful choices of their children. Their only goal is to be nice, which they interpret as love. But of course, this is the opposite of love, because true love speaks the truth and it isn’t always nice. It is false prophecy, or a belief held in opposition to the truth, to confuse love with toleration of evil.

Msgr. Pope says, “The pressure to ‘be nice’ easily translates into pressure to put a dumb grin on your face and pretend that things are great even when they’re not.” False prophecy twists the truth. It never openly opposes Christ or virtue, never actually shows its evil face. It hides and pretends to be virtue. So we get all these individualistic, tolerant versions of Christianity that insist Christ was always nice. He was tolerant. He loved and so was always welcoming and affirming. But of course this is not what Our Lord says. He says that this way of thinking is the seduction of sheep’s clothing. As St. Augustine says, it is belief in the self, not God. Our Lord insists repeatedly that hell and judgment are real, and hypocrites and liars are in grave sin, and that if we follow him we must deny ourselves and become martyrs.

Our Lord does not compromise. He loves us to much to compromise.

He does not offer a nice, harmless organized religion. He offers the Cross.

He offers a perspective that is completely transformed. A vision with real, spiritual power. A vision that both beholds our sinful weakness and our graced potential. Christianity avoids that mediocre blah of niceness. It insists on death and life, the Cross and Resurrection. Our Lord traces out the extremes because he desires to bring us to highest, most fulfilled, saintly version of ourselves. He is the God of abundance.

Our Mass Oration refers to the power of this spiritual vision when we address God as he, “whose providence never fails to set things in order.” The cosmos is a divine hierarchy shaped to the heart of God, a ladder to Heaven, an analogical poem united with the inner life of the Trinity. Everything is a symbol, everything a sign of redemption, everything inscaped with the life of Christ. We are in the midst of a sacred temple, a place of sacrifice and victory. The liturgy draws this out in a privileged and sacramental manner, that everything is being put into place. This spills over into our daily lives; God is arranging and ordering and no thing and no one falls outside the scope of his concern.

Contrast this, now, with the niceness of modernity which, because it insists on the supremacy of the individual, fragments and disintegrates and places us all as little gods into worthless kingdoms and the only virtue is allowing everyone else to be delusional, too. There’s no center, no unity, and it cannot hold.

Niceness sounds compassionate until we realize the hidden message is that we have no access to truth and no chance at redemption. Ultimately, our lives have no meaning there’s no overarching story. We’re simply here to waste time as pleasantly as possible until it’s over. St. Paul reacts to this anti-truth strongly and even gets a little sarcastic, essentially writing, “You say you’re free from rules, that’s great. You do you.” But to be free from the truth, or from justice and an ordered moral universe, this isn’t freedom at all. It’s complete and total loss.

How can we consent to such false prophecy, no matter how nice it seems?

I used to think I could get along with everyone, that if I was just nice and patient and understanding that I could be a priest who didn’t upset anyone. Now I realize that heaps of people do not like me, partly because of my off-putting personality but also for reasons really having nothing to do with me and having everything to do with the Church. There are people who simply do not like Catholics, who do not like you because you are married and have children, because you come to Holy Mass, because you adhere to a moral code. In this regard your apostolate is prophetic. You stir up controversy because (and to the extant that) your lives speak the truth of Christ.

False prophets want to sand of those edges, redefine sin so it’s less threatening, rewrite the Gospel to be less demanding. In the Anglican Church, of which I was a pastor, the faithful were so comforted by this false prophecy that they realized they were perfect just the way they are and they stopped attending Church entirely. The priests at the Oratory are here with the vocation to preach the exact opposite of all that. We’re here to remind everyone that we have a lot of potential but we all have along way to go. We still have work to do and are not yet perfectly ordered to grace. This, believe it or not, is good news. God will accomplish so much more in us. He will bring good fruit to bear within us.

So let this be an encouragement to conform your lives to Christ and allow him to lead you to the good, to that good and beautiful battle to which every Christian is called. For if the wages of sin is death, the gift of God is life everlasting.