The Pope & the Press

Into the reception room at the Vatican one day last week filed 500 members of the Union of Italian Catholic Jurists. The association of judges, lawyers and law professors had just closed its tenth annual convention with earnest discussions on the convention theme: freedom of the press. Now the delegates, having kept an open mind on the subject--no resolutions were passed--sought the counsel of Pope John XXIII. "It is on this problem, so basic in modern society," said Italian Prime Minister Antonio Segni, who led the delegates in, "that we have come together here to listen with filial devotion to the words of the Holy Father."

The words of John XXIII were not calculated to give the world's press any ease. "Can the Pope," asked he, "remain indifferent to press accounts which have nothing to do with instructions or honest information? Does his heart not suffer at the thought of the poison broadcast widely, without concern for so many innocents? Can it be legitimate to pander to morbid curiosity with details and descriptions that had better be left in the files of the police laboratories and the courts? Is it ever licit to use every criminal act, over which it would be better to draw a merciful veil, as an occasion for descriptions and reconstructions that are nothing more or less than handbooks for crime and incentives to vice?"

Although he did not say so, the Pope's immediate target was clearly Italy's gamy popular press, which licks its chops over each new scandal, e.g., last week's story of the couple in Rome, run over and killed while making love on the railroad tracks. Rome's press, while giving the Pope's admonitions good play, implied that he was merely suggesting self-control. "Self-regulation," said Rome's Il Tempo, "is without doubt the best medicine," went on to absolve itself from the Pope's accusations. Most other leading papers followed suit.

Self-control was not the Pope's solution. "There are necessary limitations to the freedom of the press," he said. "And these limitations should be strictly determined on the basis of law." Beyond that, the Pope proposed an embargo by offended Catholic readers: "Do not buy, do not believe, do not favor, and do not even mention this perverted press."

This was too much for some guardians of press liberty. Said the nondenominational U.S. weekly, Christian Century: "His statement profoundly disappoints the Christian Century and all who hoped as we did that the personal kindness of the present Pope reflected an attitude of understanding benevolence toward democratic liberties, of which one of the foremost is freedom of the press."

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