Prayerful words for those seeking truth

All but lost in the cacophony of the news of last week — continued fighting in Ukraine, continued economic worries, continued strife over abortion — were three of the most important sentences of the season. They came at the end of a 1,300-word speech that began “Happy Sunday!” and addressed a remarkable range of subjects from fishing to religious faith to what the speaker described as “a macabre regression of humanity.”

These three vital sentences were uttered by Pope Francis, and they deserve some contemplation, perhaps even prayer. The subject was press freedom. Here are those remarks:

I pay homage to journalists who pay with their lives to serve this right. Last year, 47 journalists were killed worldwide, and more than 350 were imprisoned. Special thanks go to those who courageously inform us of the wounds of humanity.

The current pontiff isn't possessed of infallible judgment; last week he suggested the Russian invasion of Ukraine might be motivated by NATO's westward expansion. But in his remarks about journalism, he recognized there have been occasions in human history when the bishop of Rome must speak of universal truths or, in this case, of the value of the truth.

This is one of them. Despite the talk about “fake news,” often promulgated by purveyors of fake news themselves, and the complaints that journalists feast on bad news, Francis saw clearly that journalists “courageously inform us of the wounds of humanity.”

It's true that the Vatican has not been faultless in this endeavor. At a time when society was suffering some of its gravest wounds, Pius XII was silent, or couched the truth in language so opaque that he helped shield those in fascist Italy and Nazi Germany from seeing how their regimes were promulgating matchless wounds of humanity. All this is set out in a remarkable new book, “The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini and Hitler” by Brown University historian David I. Kertzer, to be published in a month. Pius spoke obliquely about peace as a “sublime heavenly gift that is the desire of all good souls.” The truth was more complicated than that. It always is.

His successors have recognized that, and have spoken more forthrightly about the value of truth and, specifically, of journalism's tireless, relentless pursuit of truth.

Consider what Pope Paul

VI, who as a top aide to Pius was at the pontiff's side during World War II, had to say once he had what is truly the world's bully pulpit. Here is an excerpt of his remarks 50 years ago this spring:

Sincerity and diligence: a little reflection on the words will reveal what a supremely honorable, what a thoroughly excellent, service the truly conscientious communicator gives to mankind and to truth, whether he be reporter, editor, information officer or broadcaster. Giving information implies a great deal more than observing and reporting a passing incident. The reporter relates the incident to the context in which it happens. He searches for the causes. He examines the surrounding circumstances.

Paul's remarks are all the more relevant when read in the context of how he saw journalism — much like “scientific research,” he argued, for the reporter “must observe the facts carefully, he must check their accuracy, make a critical evaluation of the sources of his information, and finally, pass on his findings, all the time taking due care that nothing essential is overlooked or suppressed.” A course on press ethics might start, and end, with those comments.

So, too, might the remarks of John Paul II, given on Oct. 2, 1979, to journalists in a small anteroom at the headquarters of the United Nations. I was a 25-year-old reporter covering the pope's American pilgrimage, and of all the thousands of speeches I have heard — in New Hampshire mountain hamlets, Iowa farms, Quebec provincial assembly rallies, congressional hearings, presidential inaugurals — these words I consider the most memorable:

You are indeed servants of truth; you are its tireless transmitters, diffusers, defenders.

You are dedicated communicators, promoting unity among all nations by sharing truth among all peoples.

Then the pope addressed the anxieties that we possess —

“If your reporting does not always command the attention you would desire, or if it does not always conclude with the success that you would wish” — and he bid us, “Do not grow discouraged. Be faithful to the truth and to its transmission, for truth endures; truth will not go away. Truth will not pass or change.”

In the past several decades, challenges to the truth have come from dictators and presidents, and from petty local officials whose insecurity led them to close meetings that should have been open and suppress documents that should have been public. They might have heeded Pope John XXIII, who on June 29, 1959, recognized one of the great truths:

All the evils which poison men and nations and trouble so many hearts have a single cause and a single source: ignorance of the truth — and at times even more than ignorance, a contempt for truth and a reckless rejection of it. Thus arise all manner of errors, which enter the recesses of men's hearts and the bloodstream of human society as would a plague.

People in power seldom recognize the value of journalism, though one of the customs of the otherwise suspect Washington press dinners is to skewer the press and then to acknowledge its value.

Sen. John F. Kennedy did some skewering in 1958: If elected president, he said, “all reporters can go to Communist China without official protection — in fact, I'm drawing up now a list of those I want to go first.” This spring, President Joe Biden did some acknowledging, deploring a world with “disinformation massively on the rise, where the truth is buried by lies and the lies live on as truth.” Then he added:

What's clear — and I mean this from the bottom of my heart — that you, the free press, matter more than you ever did in the last century.

John Paul ended his comments a half-century ago with a truth that endures for all of us in our profession:

The service of truth, the service of humanity through the medium of the truth — is something worthy of your best years, your finest talents, your most dedicated efforts.

To which all of us, regardless of faith, might say: Amen.