Chapter 11. Freedom of the Press

A deadly and abominable freedom, the true oppression of the masses. Pope Leo the 13th.

If you continue reading the acts of the popes, you can take them one after the other, and all of them have said the same thing about the new liberties springing up from liberalism.

Freedom of conscience and forms of worship.

Freedom of the press.

Freedom of education. These are poisoned freedoms. False freedoms. Because error is always easier to spread than truth. Evil is easier to

propagate than good. It is easier to say to the people, you can have several wives than to say, you can have only one

for your whole life. It is easier, therefore, to establish divorce, as if to counterbalance marriage.

Or likewise, to grant indifferently to the true and the false the freedom to make their

way publicly, most assuredly you will have favored error at the expense of truth.

People like to say today that the truth makes its path solely by its intrinsic power

and that to triumph it does not need the unseasonable and bothersome protection

of the state and its laws? The favoritism of the states towards the truth is immediately

accused of injustice, as if justice consisted in holding an equal balance between the true

and the false, virtue and vice. This is false. The first justice

in regard to minds is to facilitate for them access to the truth and to forewarn them of error.

That is also the first charity, Veritatem facieentes in caritate, living the truth in charity.

Therefore, in charity, let us do what is true.

The balancing among all opinions, the toleration of all kinds of behavior, moral or

religious pluralism, are the mark of a society

in full decomposition, which is the liberal society desired by Freemasonry.

Now it is against the establishment of such a society that the popes of whom we speak

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