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Prior to World War One, the word propaganda was little-used in English, except by certain social activists, and close observers of the Vatican; and, back then, propaganda tended not to be the damning term we throw around today. The word had been coined in 1622, when Pope Gregory XV, frightened by the global spread of Protestantism, urgently proposed an addition to the Roman curia. The Office for the Propagation of the Faith (Congregatio de propaganda fide) would supervise the Church’s missionary efforts in the New World and elsewhere: “They are to take account of and to deal with each and every concern for the spread of the faith throughout the world.” Far from denoting lies, half-truths, selective history or any of the other tricks that we associate with “propaganda” now, that word meant, at first, the total opposite of such deceptions. Of “the sheep now wretchedly straying” the world over, Gregory wrote:
Especially it is to be desired that, inspired by divine grace, they should cease to wander amidst heresies through the unhappy pastures of infidelity, drinking deadly and poisonous water, but be placed in the pasture of the