When's it wrong to share the truth about someone?

Augustine Institute Professor Scott Hevelfinger, next.

Hello and welcome to Focus, the Catholic Cancer's podcast for living,

understanding and defending your Catholic faith.

I'm Sai Kellett, your host, and Tony and Canada sent us an email about doing an episode

on detraction, and we discussed it for a long time, whether we wanted to do that,

because we weren't sure we wanted to do episodes based on questions from people in Canada,

but we decided one Canadian every now and then, it's fine. Detraction is a sin.

But why is it a sin? Why is it wrong to tell the truth about people sometimes? And then,

particularly online, we become a little bit addicted to saying nasty things about one another.

Sometimes even just with an emoji, is that wrong? Or when is it wrong?

We decided to ask a moral theologian, and we found a great one. They've got a lot of great

theologians over at the Augustine Institute in Colorado. And so Scott Hevelfinger is here to

discuss the sin of detraction.

Scott Hevelfinger from the Augustine Institute, thank you for being with us.

Oh, thanks for having me. So we have had, we asked people to send us their questions

and topics they would like to cover. And we got a very good request to talk about the sin

of detraction. And the request was related to the possibility, this might shock you, the

possibility that there might be some detraction going on in social media. So first of all,

is that possible? Is it possible to send via social media?

Yeah, I think it absolutely is. You know, media is a form of communication. And so our speech

can come out as we usually just talk face to face or over a video conference or it can come out

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