Freedom of Expression

Before judging a freedom, one must name it accurately. Freedom of expression has a precise core and boundaries often confused with other neighbouring freedoms.

A definition: communicating one's thought freely

Freedom of expression is the right to manifest and communicate one's thought — opinions, convictions, information, judgments — without being hindered by unjust constraint, through speech, writing, the press, art or today the digital networks. It unfolds into several connected rights: freedom of opinion (thinking what one holds to be true), freedom of speech and publication, freedom of the press and of information, and the correlative right of the public to receive true information.

The decisive point, for Catholic thought, is that this freedom is not a mere power to emit sounds or to publish just anything: it is a faculty ordered to an end, the communication of truth among persons called to live together. It is its finality — seeking, speaking and sharing what is true — that founds its dignity and at the same time traces its limits.

Freedom of expression, freedom of conscience, religious freedom: not to be confused

Three freedoms that doctrine distinguishes are often confused. Freedom of conscience concerns the interior forum: the right not to be compelled to act against a right conscience. Religious freedom concerns the right to seek religious truth and practise it without civil coercion, as affirmed by the Second Vatican Council. Freedom of expression concerns the public communication of thought.

The three touch one another — one often expresses a conviction of conscience or a faith — but they do not merge, and the Church does not treat them in exactly the same way. This article stays at the level of the communication of thought; for the interior forum and faith, we refer to the dedicated articles Freedom of Conscience and Religious Freedom.

What this article covers — and what it refers elsewhere

To stay clear, this article keeps to the level of the moral and social principles of freedom of expression: its foundation, its limits, its duties, its doctrinal history and its present issues. Particular topics are treated separately:

• organized lying, journalism and the truth of information belong to truth in the media;
• the ideological confrontation over values and the pressure on Christian speech belong to the culture war;
• the public engagement of the baptized, their right and duty to speak in the city, belong to the mission of the laity in the city;
• freedom to believe and practise belongs to religious freedom.

Against the received idea of a Church suspicious on principle of free speech, the Catholic yes must first be affirmed: freedom of expression is a real good, rooted in Christian anthropology.

The dignity of the person, made for truth

Man is created in the image of God as an intelligent and free being, capable of knowing the truth and called to adhere to it freely. “The truth will make you free,” says Christ (Jn 8:32)^[3]. Preventing a man from seeking the truth, professing it and communicating it wounds what is highest in him. Speech is not an ornament: it is the expression of reason and the bond between consciences. A society that forbids all speech forbids man from being fully man.

That is why the recent Magisterium has recognized a genuine right in this domain. John XXIII, in the encyclical Pacem in Terris, lists among the fundamental rights of the person this one:

“Man has the right […] to freedom in the search for truth, as well as in the manifestation and dissemination of his thought […], within the limits of the moral order and the common good.” — John XXIII, Pacem in Terris, no. 12^[4]

The end of the sentence is no detail: the right is affirmed and bounded in the same breath. That is exactly the Catholic position — a real right, never absolute.

Speech, a gift of God and a spiritual act

For Scripture, speech is never trivial. God himself creates “by his Word” (Gen 1); the Word became flesh (Jn 1:14). Man, the image of God, receives speech as a gift and a responsibility. To speak is to go out of oneself toward another, to reveal one's thought, to establish communion — or, by lying and calumny, to destroy it. The dignity of freedom of expression comes from this: it serves that for which speech exists, the communication of what is true and good.

“Parrhesia”: the courageous frankness of the apostles

The New Testament knows an eminent form of freedom of speech: parrhesia, the bold frankness with which the apostles proclaim the Gospel, even before the powerful who want to silence them. Ordered by the Sanhedrin no longer to speak in the name of Jesus, Peter and John answer that they cannot keep silent; and the Church prays for this boldness:

“And now, Lord, […] grant to your servants to proclaim your word with all boldness.” — Acts of the Apostles 4:29^[5]

This freedom is not the whim of saying everything: it is the courage to speak what is true when it costs. In Christian tradition it founds the right and even the duty to bear public witness to the truth — including against the powers that be.

The right to true information

In the age of mass media, the Church has specified this right as a right to information. The Catechism states it clearly:

“The information provided by the media is at the service of the common good. Society has a right to information based on truth, freedom, justice and solidarity.” — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 2494^[6]

The public's right to know, the journalist's right to investigate and publish, are thus recognized — but always “at the service of the common good” and “based on truth”. Information that is free but false, or free but enslaved to interests, betrays its own reason for being. We shall meet this point again in the neighbouring article on truth in the media.

If the Church says yes to freedom of speech, she has always said no to its absolutization. Here she differs from a certain liberalism for which all speech is equal and the only limit would be the absence of limits.

“The exercise of freedom does not imply the right to say or do everything”

The principle is laid down by the Catechism in its treatise on human freedom:

“The exercise of freedom does not imply the right to say or do everything. It is false to maintain that ‘man, the subject of this freedom, is self-sufficient and therefore his final goal is the satisfaction of his own selfish interest in the enjoyment of earthly goods’ (CDF, instr. ‘Libertatis conscientia’ 13).” — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 1740^[7]

Freedom is not the indeterminacy of whim: it is the power to act according to the good and the true. Speech that is free but mendacious, defamatory or hateful is not a use of freedom — it is its abuse. Lying is not a particular case of freedom of speech: it is its corruption.

True freedom and licence: the lesson of Leo XIII

In the 19th century, faced with the liberalism that erected “freedom of speech and of the press” into an absolute and unlimited right, Leo XIII opposed a distinction that has remained classic, between true freedom and licence. In the encyclical Libertas praestantissimum (1888), he refuses the idea that one would have the right to spread truth and falsehood, good and evil indifferently:

“From these considerations it therefore follows that it is by no means permitted to demand, defend or grant indiscriminately freedom of thought, of the press, of teaching and of religions, as so many rights conferred on man by nature.” — Leo XIII, Libertas praestantissimum (1888)^[8]

Leo XIII's reasoning is not a condemnation of freedom, which he calls on the contrary “the greatest of natural goods” proper to rational creatures: it is a condemnation of deified freedom, cut off from truth and the moral law. The Church, he writes, acts “while granting rights only to what is true and honest”: Error has, as such, no right to spread; it is persons who have rights, including the right not to be deceived.

The 19th-century context: Mirari vos and the Syllabus

This wariness has a history that must be understood in its context, without anachronism. At the beginning of the 19th century, the “freedom of the press” denounced by the popes was not the mere material possibility of expressing oneself: it was a philosophical doctrine — liberal indifferentism — according to which all opinions, including atheism and the most radical religious error, would have an equal right to spread, as if truth and error had the same rights. Gregory XVI, in Mirari vos (1832), thus calls disastrous the idea that everyone must be guaranteed “freedom of conscience” understood in the indifferentist sense, and denounces “freedom of the press” handed over without restraint to the diffusion of every error^[9].

These texts must be read in the hermeneutic of continuity, without opposing them to more recent teaching. What the 19th-century popes refuse is the liberal and indifferentist foundation (error would have rights, truth would not matter), not civil freedom rightly understood. The Second Vatican Council would specify this: the freedom to be recognized is not founded on the idea that all opinions are equal, but on the dignity of the person who must seek the truth without constraint.

From the refusal of liberalism to the positive affirmation: Vatican II

The 20th century saw the Church pass from a mostly defensive language to a positive language, without contradicting herself on the substance. Gaudium et Spes recognizes the just freedom necessary for culture, research and the expression of thought^[10]. Dignitatis Humanae founds civil religious freedom on the dignity of the person — while recalling that it is exercised “within just limits” of public order and the common good. The continuity is real: it is always truth and dignity that found freedom and mark its bounds. What changes is the context (modern States, pluralism) and therefore the emphasis: no longer first the dangers of error, but first the right of the person not to be constrained in seeking what is true.

All authentic freedom carries duties within it. Freedom of expression is no exception to this law: whoever wants the right to speak accepts responsibility for what he says. Catholic tradition names with precision the goods that speech must respect.

Truth: “put away falsehood”

The first duty of speech is truth. Saint Paul makes it the mark of the new man:

“Therefore, putting away falsehood, let every one of you speak the truth with his neighbour, for we are members of one another.” — Saint Paul, Ephesians 4:25^[11]

Lying is not a variant of freedom of expression: it is its negation, because it perverts speech by diverting it from its end, which is to manifest what is true. Saint Thomas Aquinas ranks lying among the sins “contrary to the truth” and recalls that no good end makes it licit to state what is false as if it were true^[12].

Charity: “the truth in love”

Speaking what is true is not enough: it must be spoken in love. Saint Paul binds the two inseparably:

“Rather, living the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ.” — Saint Paul, Ephesians 4:15^[13]

A truth thrown in someone's face to wound, humiliate or destroy betrays charity; a cowardly silence that lets error triumph betrays truth. The Christian ideal holds both: “the truth in love”. That is why Paul immediately adds a golden rule for public and private speech:

“Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for edifying, as fits the occasion, that it may impart grace to those who hear.” — Saint Paul, Ephesians 4:29^[14]

Respect for reputation: rash judgment, detraction, defamation

Freedom of expression stops where the right of others to their honour and reputation begins. The Catechism lists with clarity the sins of the tongue that violate this right:

“He becomes guilty of rash judgment who […] assumes as true, without sufficient foundation, the moral fault of a neighbour; of detraction who, without objectively valid reason, discloses another's faults and failings to persons who did not know them; of calumny who, by remarks contrary to the truth, harms the reputation of others.” — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 2477^[15]

The distinction is precise and remains enlightening in the age of networks, where a reputation can be destroyed in an instant:

The Catechism recalls that these faults are not venial by nature: “no one has the right to make known without necessary reason the faults of others”, and whoever has harmed another's reputation is bound to reparation^[16][17]. Freedom to publish never covers the right to smear.

Scandal: speech that makes others fall

One last duty, often forgotten in debates on freedom of expression: not to scandalize, in the strong sense. Scandal, the Catechism teaches, is “an attitude or behaviour which leads another to do evil”^[18]. Speech, a publication, an image can be a trap that makes the most fragile fall. Christ had for scandal words of unique severity:

“But whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened round his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.” — Gospel according to Saint Matthew 18:6^[19]

Freedom of expression therefore gives no right to spread what deliberately corrupts consciences, especially those of the youngest and weakest — a point that touches, for example, the question of pornography or of violence erected into “content”.

Temperance of the tongue

Scripture knows how hard speech is to master. The letter of Saint James makes of the tongue a celebrated meditation on a small member with disproportionate effects:

“So the tongue is a little member and boasts of great things. How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire!” — Letter of Saint James 3:5^[20]

Sirach likewise devotes long verses to the “third tongue”, that of the talebearer, which “has destroyed many” (Sir 28:13-18)^[21]. Temperance of the tongue — knowing how to keep silent, weighing one's words, refusing calumny — is not a censorship imposed from outside: it is a virtue, the fruit of self-mastery, without which no freedom of speech is truly human.

The Bible does not deal with “freedom of expression” in the modern sense, but it is traversed from end to end by a theology of speech: its power, its responsibility, its judgment.

“Death and life are in the power of the tongue”

The wisdom of Israel measures exactly the weight of speech:

“Death and life are in the power of the tongue, and those who love it will eat its fruits.” — Proverbs 18:21^[22]

Speech can heal or kill, raise up or crush. This gravity founds both the right to speak — for speech creates life — and the duty to answer for it.

The reckoning for idle words

Christ pushes this responsibility to its term: no word is without consequence before God.

“I tell you, on the day of judgment men will render account for every careless word they utter.” — Gospel according to Saint Matthew 12:36^[23]

Far from trivializing speech, the Gospel takes it infinitely seriously. Freedom to speak is also a responsibility to speak — including in the chatter, mockery and rumour that digital ease multiplies.

Speaking with courage: prophets, apostles and martyrs

Conversely, Scripture exalts courageous speech: that of the prophets who denounce the injustice of kings, that of John the Baptist who pays with his head for the truth told to Herod, that of Jesus before Pilate: “For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth” (Jn 18:37)^[24]. Christian tradition sees in this the summit of freedom of speech: not the right to say everything, but the duty to speak what is true, even at the cost of one's life. The martyrs are, in this sense, the first witnesses of a freedom of expression higher than that of charters.

With the press, radio, television and then digital media, the Church has developed her own teaching on social communication, which extends and specifies her doctrine of freedom of expression.

Inter Mirifica and the right to information (Vatican II)

From its second session, the Second Vatican Council promulgated an entire decree, Inter Mirifica (4 December 1963), on the “means of social communication”. The council affirms there both the right to information and its submission to the moral law:

“There exists, within human society, a right to information about matters which affect men […]. The correct exercise of this right, however, demands that the information provided always be true and, with justice and charity respected, complete.” — Second Vatican Council, Inter Mirifica, no. 5^[25]

The council recalls that the “objective moral order” binds all those who use these means: no technical progress in dissemination exempts public speech from the demands of truth and charity.

The Catechism: information, justice and charity

The Catechism synthesizes this doctrine in a dedicated section (§ 2493-2499). It affirms the service of the common good (§ 2494, quoted above), then lays down duties at both ends of the chain:

“Information through the media is at the service of the common good […]. To make a moral judgment, one must take into account […] the truth of the information, the rights and dignity of persons.” — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 2494-2497^[26]

It invites those who receive information to temperance and discipline in the face of media that can enslave (§ 2496), and it recalls to public authorities their duty to defend “true and just freedom of information”^[27].

The duties of journalists and of public authorities

Doctrine therefore does not oppose freedom and responsibility: it binds them. The journalist has a real right to investigate and publish, but a grave duty of truth, fairness and respect for persons. Public authorities have the duty to guarantee freedom of information against monopolies and pressures, but also to protect the common good, youth and the dignity of persons against its abuses. We find here, applied to the media, the same logic as for transparency in public life: the light of truth is the friend of the common good, the shadow of falsehood its enemy.

The Catholic doctrine of freedom of expression is no museum piece: it sheds light on burning debates of our time, in which public speech is threatened from both sides — by excess and by constraint.

Disinformation and “fake news”

The most discussed danger is disinformation: the mass fabrication and diffusion of false news. Pope Francis devoted his message for the 2018 World Day of Social Communications to it, entitled after Christ: “The truth will set you free (Jn 8:32)”. He describes the mechanism of media lying by tracing it back to the “father of lies”:

“The first fake news […] dates back to the origins of history […]. This is how the ‘father of lies’ acts (cf. Jn 8:44) […]. The strategy of this skilful communication of evil is the serpent.” — Francis, Message for the 52nd World Day of Social Communications (24 January 2018)^[28]

The remedy, says Francis, is not only technical: it is a “journalism of peace”, at the service of truth and the person, and an education in discernment. Disinformation is the opposite of freedom of expression: it uses freedom of speech to destroy the truth which is the very object of that freedom. This point is developed in truth in the media.

Blasphemy and religious offence: may everything be mocked?

One recurring question pits freedom of expression against respect for the sacred: does one have the right to mock faith, believers, what they hold holy? The Catholic position is nuanced. On the one hand, the Church does not demand that the State punish every irreverence criminally: faith is proposed, not imposed, and blasphemy takes nothing away from God. On the other hand, she recalls that not everything legal is permitted: gratuitously mocking what millions of men venerate is no feat of freedom, but often a failure of respect and charity. “One cannot provoke, one cannot insult the faith of others, one cannot make fun of faith,” Pope Francis recalled after attacks committed in the name of religious mockery^[29]. Freedom of expression does not erase the duty of respect; and gratuitous offence, without always being a crime, remains a moral fault.

Censorship, “cancelling” and self-censorship: the new threats

The opposite danger to disinformation is constraint on true speech. When opinions are banished from debate not because they are false but because they displease, when persons are silenced or excluded for expressing a conviction, when fear of reprisals breeds self-censorship, it is freedom of expression itself that is wounded. The Church, which has known in history many persecutions of speech, defends here the right to seek and speak what is true without being crushed by social or ideological pressure. This conflict lies at the heart of what is called the culture war.

The freedom to witness to the faith in public space

Finally, freedom of expression includes for the Christian the right — and the duty — to bear public witness to his faith. Relegating religion to the private sphere alone, forbidding believers to make their voice heard on the great human questions, would deny freedom of expression at the very moment it is proclaimed. The baptized are called to speak in the city with both courage (the parrhesia of the apostles) and respect (“the truth in love”). This is the subject of the mission of the laity in the city.

Spiritual tradition confirms and deepens this doctrine: mastery of speech is a school of holiness.

Saint Thomas: speaking truly without harming

Saint Thomas Aquinas analyzed with unequalled precision the virtues and vices of speech. He shows that lying is always wrong, even “officious” or “jocose” lying, because it contradicts the natural end of speech^[30]. But he also teaches that one is not bound to say everything: one may keep silent about a truth out of prudence or charity, and one sins by detraction (detractio) or by insult (contumelia) when one wounds the honour of one's neighbour without necessity^[31]. The Thomist rule is luminous: never say what is false, do not always say what is true, and always respect the person.

Fraternal correction: speech that loves

Tradition also knows a freedom of speech turned toward the good of the other: fraternal correction, by which one warns with charity whoever errs (cf. Mt 18:15). Saint Thomas sees in it an act of charity, not a right to judge: one speaks to heal, not to humiliate^[32]. It is the exact opposite of detraction: the same words can save or destroy, depending on whether they seek the good of the other or his fall.

The saints and the press at the service of the good

In the modern era, saints understood that freedom of the press could serve the Gospel: Saint John Bosco multiplying popular publications, Saint Maximilian Kolbe founding very widely circulated reviews to spread truth and love of the Virgin. Far from fearing public speech, they seized it as a missionary instrument, proving that the Church does not dread freedom of expression but expects it to serve truth and the good^[33].

Freedom of expression, as seen by the Church, is neither an idol nor a threat: it is a real and fragile good, to be both defended and purified. Defended, against all those who would gag the search for and the utterance of what is true — censors, propagandists, persecutors of the faith. Purified, against all those who confuse it with the right to lie, to calumniate, to scandalize, to destroy.

The Catholic criterion is not the quantity of permitted speech, but its orientation. Speech is truly free when it serves that for which speech exists: “the truth in love” (Eph 4:15). Outside of this, it turns against man. For “death and life are in the power of the tongue” — and the same freedom that allows one to bear witness to Christ before the powerful also allows one to smear an innocent person in an instant. Between the two, there is no censorship, but a virtue: truth spoken with courage and with love.

• Truth in the Media — lying, information and journalism in the face of truth.
• Religious Freedom — the right to seek and practise religious truth without constraint.
• Freedom of Conscience — the interior forum and the right not to act against a right conscience.
• The Culture War — the clash of worldviews and the pressure on speech.
• The Mission of the Laity in the City — the right and duty of the baptized to speak in public space.