By the Archbishop of Selsey

When Adolf Eichmann sat in his glass booth in Jerusalem in 1962, the world expected to see a monster. What it saw instead was a man—quiet, bureaucratic, unremarkable. That was the horror.

The Holocaust survivor Yehiel Dinur, who collapsed in the courtroom at the sight of him, later explained that it was not memory that overwhelmed him. It was the realisation that Eichmann was not a demon. He was ordinary. Evil, he saw, does not always come with horns and fire. It comes in the form of ordinary men surrendering their consciences to dangerous ideas.¹

That truth is no less urgent today. The ideologies have changed, but the mechanics remain. Islamism sanctifies violence as obedience to God. Secular progressivism dehumanises its opponents as “fascists” and “threats to democracy.” Even within the Church, leaders have repeated this language, denouncing fellow Christians at the Unite the Kingdom March as extremists while remaining silent about the assassination of Charlie Kirk, slain in America only days before for his public witness.²

The double standard is glaring. A mother praying outside an abortion clinic is branded a terrorist; a jihadist who slaughters families in Israel is excused as a “resistance fighter.” A Christian patriot with a banner is shamed by bishops; a leftist agitator screaming hatred is praised as a prophet of progress. When truth is inverted this way, society reveals not only political corruption but spiritual sickness.

The danger lies not only in what is done but in how it is spoken. When political leaders label their opponents “Nazis” or “enemies of humanity,” when bishops rebuke the faithful more harshly than they rebuke the spirit of the age, the result is the same: people cease to be treated as neighbours. Once dehumanised, they can be silenced, punished, erased. History shows that the road to atrocity begins not with bullets but with words.³

Here the wisdom of the Church resounds. St Augustine warned that fallen man justifies his corruption unless restrained by grace.⁴ St Thomas Aquinas taught that a law contrary to the natural law is no law at all but a perversion.⁵ Pope Pius XI condemned Nazism as a false religion.⁶ Pope Leo XIII warned that when the authority of Christ is rejected, conscience loses its compass and men are “driven headlong into every excess of error and crime.”⁷ The ideologies of our time—whether Islamist or secular progressive—repeat this pattern. They make evil appear good, and they sanctify hatred in the name of righteousness.

But here is the paradox for us, my beloved brethren. We cannot resist evil by mirroring it. We cannot fight dehumanisation with more dehumanisation. We must oppose lies, yes, and boldly. We must defend truth, yes, and courageously. But we must do so without losing charity. For the Cross teaches us that Christ conquered not by hating His enemies, but by offering Himself for them. “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” (Lk 23:34)

This is the Church’s path: to proclaim truth without compromise and to live it with sacrificial love. To expose the rhetoric of the world for what it is—poisonous, dangerous, destructive—yet not to be poisoned by it ourselves. To recognise, even in our fiercest adversaries, men made in the image of God, and to call them to repentance.

Eichmann’s ordinariness is a warning: ideology can make any man capable of horror. The rhetoric of our age is a warning: dehumanisation always prepares the ground for persecution. And Christ’s Cross is the answer: only love, grounded in truth, can break the cycle.

We must not be naïve. The age of tolerance has revealed itself as an age of ideology, and Christians will be its scapegoats. But let us not tremble. We know the pattern. We have seen it before. And we know, too, that the final word is not the banality of evil, but the triumph of grace.

Ordinary men, dangerous ideas. That is the danger. Ordinary Christians, faithful to Christ. That is the hope.

For a more indepth presentation visit Nuntiatoria.org

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Footnotes
¹ Yehiel Dinur, interview with Mike Wallace, 60 Minutes (CBS News, 1979).
² Reports on the Unite the Kingdom March, September 2025; cf. coverage of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, State Farm Stadium Memorial, Glendale, AZ, 21 September 2025.
³ Cf. contemporary political rhetoric: President Joe Biden’s remarks, “MAGA Republicans a threat to democracy” (Philadelphia speech, 1 September 2022); Labour MPs on gender-critical feminists, Hansard debates 2023–25; Canadian federal cases against pro-life campaigners, 2023–24.
⁴ St Augustine, De Natura et Gratia, ch. 3.
⁵ St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 93, a. 3.
⁶ Pius XI, Mit Brennender Sorge, 1937.
⁷ Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, 1885.

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