‘Freedom of speech essential for dignity, the common good’

PICTURE: Hugo Magalhaes/Pexels

The Catholic Register

At the end of Pope Francis’ autobiography, simply titled Hope for the Jubilee Year, he shared a poem from the 20th-century Turkish poet, Nâzım Hikmet. It’s at the end of a chapter titled ‘For The Best Days Are Still to Come’, and the poem’s title, On Living, serves as a fitting close for a book titled Hope.

The poem ends: ‘And the most beautiful words I wanted to tell you/I haven’t said yet … ‘. We can pray the most beautiful words that haven’t been said yet will soon be allowed to be said, because we’ve been steeped in times when speaking freely has not always been possible.

The Catholic feast of St Francis de Sales, the patron saint of journalists, takes place on 24 January, and is a moment to reflect on the importance of freedom of speech, not just as a political issue but as a teaching of the Church. In 2025, we asked ourselves whether the fundamental right of speech, as the Church puts it, is gaining or losing ground.

In the words of Pope Francis, there was reason to hope the best days are still to come, but it’s not an exaggeration to say the past decade hasn’t been the best time for freedom of expression around the world.

It’s been difficult to watch, particularly from a journalistic perspective. Reporters and commentators did not shine over the past few years, in large measure leaving their traditional post as gatekeepers and joining the ranks of censors and regulators

They and their news organisations (operating through) programmes with Orwellian names like the Trusted News Initiative and the Trust Project, the proliferation of media ‘fact-checkers’, and financial incentives from Google to governments, ensured traditional media weren’t going to upset any apple carts – not when those carts carried the apples that fed them.

Catholic teaching calls freedom of speech a fundamental human right that’s essential for human dignity and the common good. We are created in the image of God, and human dignity includes the right to freely express our honest thoughts and opinions.

The Second Vatican Council document, Communio et Progressio, which I often quote during journalism talks, says, ‘It is absolutely essential that there be freedom to express ideas and attitudes’ if public opinion is ‘to emerge in the proper manner’.

This condition isn’t without limits: it must not endanger the common good or public morality. That’s as implicit a check on free expression as is necessary. So long as we are considering the rights and dignity of others, there is no need for ‘fact-checkers’ to intervene.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church likewise says individuals have ‘the right and the moral duty to seek the truth, especially in what concerns God and his Church’.

So where do things stand as far as freedom of expression is concerned?

Suddenly, around the start of this year – some would say it happened about two months earlier – businesses and organisations that couldn’t find their tongues a year earlier suddenly began pushing back on compelled speech and forced political agendas. Social media companies began broadening their own self-imposed boundaries for free speech.

Pope Francis urged Vatican diplomats this year to ‘overcome the logic of confrontation and embrace instead the logic of encounter’, ‘pressing forward as pilgrims of hope’ who are ‘committed to building a future of peace’.

In a world threatened by global war, he said the vocation of diplomacy is to foster dialogue with all parties, not only those who are ‘convenient’. We can pray the world is being prepared for such dialogue and that the most beautiful words, not yet said, can be spoken.