War Of The Words

The Church & Recovery Of Reality

Nearly fifteen years ago, one of my children greeted a celebrated athlete as a “beast.”

He meant it as praise. Pure praise.

And why not? Teenage slang has always delighted in inversion. It scavenges the grotesque and crowns it with admiration. It’s a kind of verbal cartwheel, half rebellion and half belonging. No one, of course, was confusing a defensive end with a Dementor.

I smiled at first. I understood exactly what he meant.

But I also paused. Not because I was confused, but because something tugged at me quietly, almost imperceptibly. Beneath the humor was a subtler force at work: the strange alchemy of words, their power to invert value, recast virtue, and, given enough time, erode the inner scaffolding by which we recognize goodness, restraint, and human excellence. I couldn’t have named it then. I can now.

In the moral vocabulary of my youth, monsters were never heroes. They were warnings. Vampires. Dragons. Orcs. For those of us raised on late-night television, even the sleestacks of Land Of The Lost. In human form, they bore names that still chill the spine: Hitler. Dahmer. Not merely villains, but examples of what happens when desire or ideology breaks free from any moral tether, souls shattered against the hard fact of reality. Their outward ugliness reflected an interior collapse.

That the same words could now be spoken as praise felt, on the surface, harmless. Exaggeration. Slang. Nothing more. And yet it hinted at something deeper: language beginning to slip its anchors, symbols drifting loose from the realities they once named, moral polarity quietly, almost politely, reversing itself.

Cultures, like adolescents, play with words. The difference is that cultures inherit the consequences of their play.

That moment with my son was not a rebuke of slang. It was an intimation. Language is not mere ornamentation of thought. It shapes thought. It trains us slowly, persistently, in what to admire, what to excuse, what to fear, and what to call good.

Here, whimsy gives way to gravity.

When Words Slip Their Anchors

The same linguistic flexibility that amuses the young becomes something else entirely when deliberately seized by movements or regimes. Words, once unmoored, do not illuminate; they obscure. They do not reveal truth; they render it pliable, obedient not to reality, but to preference.

We do not merely use language. We dwell within it. From the earliest reflections on reason, words were understood as bound to reality itself. Speech points beyond itself. It names what is. Truth is not manufactured; it is received. When language remains tethered to its referents, disagreement, sometimes fierce disagreement, remains possible. When it drifts, argument collapses into assertion, and power rushes in to settle what reason no longer can.

Philosophers have warned for centuries that confused words breed confused minds. Confused minds, in turn, are easily ruled. This is why propaganda rarely succeeds through obvious lies. Its more potent strategy is renaming.

Propaganda preserves the familiar shell of words while quietly shifting their moral and emotional cargo. Over time, the public continues to speak the old vocabulary while inhabiting an entirely new moral landscape. The change feels administrative. It feels measured. It often feels humane.

History lays bare the pattern with chilling clarity. In Nazi Germany, the machinery of death was preceded not chiefly by violence, but by words. Under Goebbels, Jews were not immediately marked for extermination. They were first recast as parasites, vermin, rats, vectors of disease. Language performed the slow labor of dissociation, severing the human referent from the symbol that once named it. A neighbor became a nuisance, a family became an infestation, and eventually, a person became a problem to be solved.

This did not require a sudden national embrace of a single monstrous lie. It required repetition, constant, ambient, bureaucratic repetition, until the phrases felt ordinary, inevitable, even compassionate. People notice abrupt change. Incremental drift slips past almost unnoticed. By the time language had completed its work, deeds once unthinkable could appear regrettable yet necessary. Sometimes, even virtuous.

Repetition forges perception. Perception molds moral imagination. Moral imagination yields consent.

Psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton, studying totalitarian movements and their aftermath, observed that such systems do not begin by demanding cruelty. They begin by inducing a kind of psychic numbing, a narrowing of moral vision in which words are emptied, reassigned, and insulated from their human consequences. I remember first encountering this insight and being struck by how ordinary, almost banal, the process appeared.

Most sobering of all, this conditioning did not require a nation of fanatics. It unfolded amid ordinary lives: professionals, parents, neighbors, even cultural Christians. Many never actively chose evil. They simply permitted words to work unchallenged. By the time the trains rolled, the language had already arrived.

Propaganda, then, functions as moral anesthesia. It numbs the conscience by redefining reality until horror no longer registers as fully human. The corruption of language is never incidental. It is the precondition of every large-scale moral catastrophe.

The Modern Vocabulary of Moral Drift

Once you recognize the pattern, the echoes in our own culture become impossible to ignore.

Take the word choice. It used to name the noble faculty of deliberating toward what is good. Today, it’s been narrowed into a kind of moral trump card, used to immunize any decision from outside scrutiny. Choice isn’t about selecting between goods anymore; it’s become the “good” itself, totally detached from the consequences for others.

We see the same thing with the word life. This sacred, inviolable reality is now hedged in with qualifiers: viability, wantedness, quality, personhood. Each one adds a layer of distance between the word and the beating heart it once named without condition. Life becomes something negotiable. Something subject to arbitration.

Even marriage, which across cultures and centuries named the embodied union of man and woman ordered toward permanence, is being treated as a legal institution to be amended rather than a reality to be recognized. To redefine it is to sever the symbol from the reality it signified, then insist the new symbol keeps the old authority. We see it again in the way man and woman are treated as self-assigned identities, unmoored from the givenness of the body. Here, language doesn’t describe reality; it seeks to override it.

This is not an advance in clarity. It is a retreat into confusion.

You Cannot Break Reality—Only Be Broken by It

Reality itself, however, remains intact. We cannot shatter objective moral order. We can only shatter ourselves against it. (Thank you, Cecil B. DeMille) The structure of the world is not a suggestion but a gift. To deny it does not abolish it; it ensures that its corrective pressure will be felt as suffering rather than wisdom.

I did not always understand this. Few of us did.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the dramatic expansion of what we label “mental illness.” Once reserved for grave and identifiable disorders, the term now blankets nearly every form of human distress: anxiety, alienation, despair, the ordinary ache of finitude. Compassion rightly seeks relief. Yet the wholesale medicalization of meaning can conceal a deeper cultural fracture.

A society that systematically detaches symbols from their referents, that teaches suspicion of body, limit, and inheritance, should not be surprised when fragmentation becomes epidemic. Dissociation ceases to be an anomaly and becomes institutionalized. At that point, manipulation no longer depends on individual whim. It operates through systems that understand how to harness fear and language at scale.

The COVID era revealed how devastating this dynamic can become. It was not only that churches were closed while big-box stores remained open. More grievous was that many whose lives and vocations were founded on the conviction that the sacraments are essential quietly adopted a different vocabulary, not by formal decree, but by acquiescence. Their unspoken language declared the sacraments of eternal life “non-essential,” as if what mediates eternal life could be suspended without spiritual cost.

What followed was not merely compliance, but a hollowing out, an ache among the faithful who had believed otherwise, and a silent confusion among a watching world that might never realize this was precisely the medicine for its own unnamed hunger.

When shepherds adopt the language of those who do not believe what they believe, the flock is not simply inconvenienced. It is disoriented. Left to arbitrate reality alone, armed with unformed consciences and competing narratives, people do not find freedom. They find exhaustion.

This fracture appears not only in words, but in bodies. The modern refusal to name disorder often leads not to healing, but to decoration, wounds masked rather than treated, pain curated through screens. Digital mediation compounds the problem, replacing presence with pixels, embodiment with abstraction. When the body is treated as raw material rather than gift, beauty loses its meaning, and ugliness goes unnamed. And what goes unnamed cannot be redeemed.

The Church as Hospital—or Lobby

Healing, then, cannot be confined to technique or pharmacology, vital though they may be. It begins with the humble act of naming reality as it is, of bowing before it, accepting limits as grace, inhabiting the body as gift, and recognizing that true freedom is not the license to invent oneself, but the capacity to give oneself in truth.

The moral tradition has always insisted that conscience does not create truth. It bears witness to it. And it must itself be formed.

Here, another word must be spoken, this time about the Church herself.

Many faithful Catholics during the last pontificate voiced concern not from rejection of mercy, but from a longing for the clarity that mercy requires. The difficulty lay not in compassion, but in language. In significant ways, the Church’s public speech appeared to participate in a wider cultural confusion about reality. Words meant to console were sometimes heard as permission to remain unhealed.

Terms such as accompaniment, discernment, and blessing were deployed without sufficient tether to repentance, conversion, and the moral law. For many souls seeking truth, this left them as solitary arbiters, navigating grave matters of life, sexuality, marriage, and sacramental order by subjective and inadequately formed conscience. The result was not peace, but disorientation. Not healing, but prolonged suffering.

Saint Augustine called the Church a hospital for sinners. He did not enter for a free cup of coffee, to be affirmed in his malady or welcomed into perpetual convalescence. He entered to be diagnosed and cured. Where diagnosis is softened or withheld, healing is delayed. Where truth is attenuated, suffering multiplies.

The abuse crisis taught this lesson with excruciating clarity. Euphemisms like misconduct or administrative reassignment masked moral atrocity. Reality was veiled. The vulnerable bore the cost. When words fail to name evil truthfully, devastation follows.

These wounds are not confined to one pontificate, one office, or one generation. They belong to the whole Body whenever comfort is preferred to clarity, ambiguity to precision, affirmation detached from truth.

The Word Made Flesh, and the Recovery of Beauty

Yet this is not the Church’s final word.

She does not invent truth. She receives and proclaims it. Her authority shines most brightly when her language is lucid, her sacraments reverent, her doctrine coherent, and her mercy unmistakably ordered toward conversion and restoration.

At the heart of the Christian claim stands the Logos. God is not merely truthful; He is the Word through whom all things were made. He did not remain distant. He became flesh. In doing so, He bound meaning irrevocably to matter, speech to body, truth to love.

Here, every thread of the argument finds its resolution. Language is not a tool to manipulate, but a gift to steward. We are summoned not to rename reality, but to conform ourselves to the Word made flesh, to become what we are through participation in Him, to love the world not by redefining it, but by redeeming it.

We stand at an anthropological and spiritual threshold. The hour calls for clarity over slogans, humility over self-assertion, truth over therapeutic illusion.

Words matter because reality matters. And reality, however resisted, remains the ground on which every civilization either stands or falls.

In Christ, even falling need not be final. It can become the beginning of resurrection, the recovery of our true humanity, and the restoration of beauty where the beast once seemed to reign.

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