On the papal plane from Sri Lanka to the Philippines Jan. 15, Pope Francis, speaking about the terrorist attacks on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo earlier this month, put the world on notice. “If (my aide Alberto Gasparri) says a swear word against my mother, he’s going to get a punch,” said the 78-year-old pontiff, throwing a mock punch in his aide’s direction. “Provoking and insulting other people’s faiths is not right. There is a limit. Every religion has its dignity.”
The impromptu remarks were largely criticized as inconsistent with the principles of free speech. Former CNN host Piers Morgan, a Catholic, condemned the pope’s remarks as condoning the same sort of violence as the Paris attacks. British media outlets the Guardian and the Independent both published editorials asserting that the pope’s comments revealed limits to his liberalism. On CBS’s Face the Nation, British Prime Minister David Cameron said “In a free society, there is a right to cause offence about someone’s religion. … I’m a Christian. If someone says something offensive about Jesus, I might find that offensive, but in a free society I don’t have a right to wreak vengeance on them.”
To be fair, the pope also condemned killing in the name of religion as an “aberration” and stood up for free speech. But he also said “there are so many people who speak badly about religions or other religions who make fun of them, who make a game out of the religions of others. They are provocateurs. And what happens to them is what would happen to Dr. Gasparri if he says a curse word against my mother. There is a limit.” The man is trying to toe a line.
The Vatican attempted to control the criticism largely by working to diminish the significance of the comments. Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi told the Associated Press that the pope was not “justifying violence,” but rather speaking of “a spontaneous reaction that you can have when you feel profoundly offended.” Another Vatican spokesman, Thomas Rosica, told CNN Jan. 15 that “the pope’s words about Dr. Gasbarri were spoken colloquially” and that “his response might be similar to something each of us has felt when those dearest to us are insulted or harmed.” He added that the remarks “must be taken at face value and not distorted or manipulated.”
Yet Francis’ stance on offensive content is untenable. The response to offensive content cannot be violent — this is essentially vigilantism. And if some content is too offensive to be published, who gets to decide where that line is drawn? Legal limits on what can be published threaten the entire marketplace of ideas.
Many of the pundits who criticized the pope misunderstood him as calling for external restrictions on free speech. But Francis wasn’t making a legal argument. There’s a critical distinction between enforced censorship and voluntary self-censorship — between not publishing something because you can’t and not publishing something because it’s rude. No one questions Charlie Hebdo’s right to exist. The pope questions what he sees as the magazine’s disrespectful content.
Francis wasn’t asking that Charlie Hebdo be prohibited from publishing cartoons of Muhammad, but that the magazine choose not to. There’s a difference between substantive criticism and intentional insult. Francis condemned the intentional insult. His point wasn’t about external censorship but about civility.
Lucky for him, there’s a part of society where that standard is already practiced: the mainstream American media. Many news outlets, including National Public Radio, the New York Times and CNN declined to publish Hebdo cartoons depicting Muhammad. The mainstream media — to use the popular phrase — isn’t Charlie.
Dean Bacquet, executive editor of the New York Times, wrestled between the Hebdo cartoons’ objective news value and their offensive content, wrote Margaret Sullivan, public editor at the New York Times, in a Jan. 8 column. After considering the potential danger to his staff, Bacquet decided not to run the cartoons. “We have a standard that is long held and that serves us well,” he said. “There is a line between gratuitous insult and satire. Most of these are gratuitous insult.”
In a Jan. 12 blog post on its website, NPR explained its decision not to publish the cartoons. It was also willing to accept the threat of reprisal but decided that “photos showing just a few of the magazine’s covers could lead viewers to mistakenly conclude that Charlie Hebdo is only a bit edgier than other satirical publications. But a comprehensive display of Charlie Hebdo’s work would require posting images that go well beyond most news organizations’ standards regarding offensive material.”
The Washington Post drew a more nuanced line and allowed a Hebdo cartoon to run alongside an opinions column but did not permit it on the news pages since the paper won’t print material “that is pointedly, deliberately or needlessly offensive to members of religious groups,” said Martin Baron, the executive editor of the Washington Post.
Of course, many people believe that the cartoons had a right to be published for either their news value or for their defiance of terrorism — or for both. Newer outlets like Buzzfeed and Huffington Post have run the images, showing a divergence from older journalistic standards. Meanwhile, Charlie Hebdo’s latest issue prominently features Muhammad, for what I somehow doubt will be the last time.
Let’s just hope they lay off the pope’s mother.
Duncan Weinstein ’17 can be reached at duncan_weinstein@brown.edu.
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