The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread

by Cailin O'Connor

The term “propaganda” originated in the early seventeenth century, when Pope Gregory XV established the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide—the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith. The Congregation was charged with spreading Roman Catholicism through missionary work across the world and, closer to home, in heavily Protestant regions of Europe. (Today the same body is called the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples.) Politics and religion were deeply intertwined in seventeenth-century Europe, with major alliances and even empires structured around theological divides between Catholics and Protestants.15 The Congregation’s activities within Europe were more than religious evangelization: they amounted to political subversion, promoting the interests of France, Spain, and the southern states of the Holy Roman Empire in the Protestant strongholds of northern Europe and Great Britain. It was this political aspect of the Catholic Church’s activities that led to the current meaning of propaganda as the systematic, often biased, spread of information for political ends.