I have been prompted to ask this question as a consequence of some recent reading into the historical context of Gregory’s announcement. But one wonders whether Pope Gregory’s intention to propagate the faith not was quite as innocent (to borrow the moniker adopted by his successor’s successor) as such brief allusions to the coining of the term propaganda might suggest. There is no question that popular consciousness of the power of propaganda did emerge in force after World War One. So say the conventional, one-line references to the etymology of the term ‘propaganda,’ generally appearing in contemporary accounts of the history of public diplomacy. Propaganda was simply an acceptable process of exhortation on behalf of a cause the term did not acquire its nefarious connotations until sometime between the First and Second World Wars. Propaganda was not about mind-control or robbing the masses of their ability to rationally respond to facts by denying them full and unbiased information.

Rather, the connotation of this first use of the term ‘propaganda,’ and its meaning until the twentieth century, was a value-neutral one.

In this context, it is often noted that the Pope’s intention in making his new congregation responsible for ‘ propaganda fide’-literally, propagating the faith-was not to endorse a shared information policy based on deceitful practices. Before public diplomacy, there was propaganda, a term coined by Pope Gregory XV in 1622 when he founded a new college to train missionaries to be sent to Protestant Northern Europe, Asia, and the New World.

The Thirty Years War by C.V. Wedgwood