Section 6: The Duty of Keeping Secrets

Neither the duty of telling the truth nor the virtue of veracity, demand that we disclose everything that we know always or to all men. On the contrary, we are sometimes bound to withhold knowledge or information from others.¹ This brings us to the consideration of secrets.

¹ St. Thomas, Summa Theol., 2a 2ae, qu. 40, art. 3: “A will would be disordered if someone wished nothing to be concealed from him by others.”—Gury, Comp. Theol. Mor., Vol. I, n. 484: “A secret is knowledge of some matter which by its own nature or by a special contract must be kept hidden.”

1. A secret (secretum) is something hidden or concealed, or, more properly, knowledge or information which we are in duty bound to keep from others.

There are various kinds of secrets. a) A secret is called natural (secretum naturale) if a man has accidentally or inadvertently or purposely through his own efforts (secretum extortum) obtained a knowledge of something which he may not reveal to others without violating justice or charity, or which the one concerned has a right to hide. The latter category includes everything that cannot be revealed without injury to the honor, reputation, or property of others. If a crime can be prevented, or an injustice righted by the revelation of a secret, it may be revealed, but only to those who are in a position to act effectively, for instance, parents and superiors. b) The duty of keeping a secret sometimes rests upon positive grounds, as when a secret has been communicated or entrusted to one in an official capacity, or for safe-keeping under promise of silence. To the former class (secreta commissa) belong the so-called official or professional secrets, i. e., communications made to a man solely because of his official station or office, or communications made because of knowledge he has obtained by means of official functions or by participation in debates or trials. c) The promised secret (secretum promissum) arises from the fact that one has, through one’s own efforts, obtained a knowledge of a secret and then bound himself by a promise to keep it from others.

If a man comes for professional advice to another, as to a lawyer or a doctor, or simply to a friend for moral counsel, and in order thereto imparts to him natural secrets, those secrets, as they are received and held by the person consulted, are called secrets of trust or privileged secrets, be- cause, in contradistinction to natural secrets and secrets of promise, they need not be delivered up at the demand of an authority empowered to inquire in the department in which the secret lies.

The highest kind of privileged secret is that called sacramental. It is protected by the seal of confession (secretum sacramentale, sigillum confessionis) and arises from the Sacrament of Penance.²

² Cfr. this Handbook, Vol. II, pp. 167 sqq.—J. P. Gury, Comp. Theol. Mor., Vol. I, n. 485, 488; Irish Theol. Quarterly, Vol. V (1910), No. 17; Vol. VIII (1913), No. 29, No. 31.

2. The duty of keeping secrets needs to be more accurately circumscribed. a) Broadly speaking, a man is bound to keep every secret of which he has knowledge. To divulge a secret of any kind without urgent reason is a sin against both charity and justice, the guilt of which is measured, first, by the malice involved in the act, and, secondly, by the importance of the secret divulged and the injury inflicted by its revelation.

It is sinful to induce others to violate the duty of secrecy, especially if it is done maliciously or by force.

More particularly, the obligation of secrecy is gauged by the nature of the secret. The seal of confession by its very nature binds absolutely and always. So-called natural secrets are based upon the obligation of justice, which man owes his fellowmen, and which admits of exceptions for just reasons, and does not exclude silent reservation.

Silent reservation is admissible also in regard to committed or entrusted secrets, nay, even in regard to secrets promised under oath.³

³ J. P. Gury, op. cit., I, n. 486: “Question I: What are the just causes for disclosing a secret? Answer: (1) The rightly presumed consent of the person whose interest it is to conceal the secret; (2) disclosure of the matter made from another source; (3) harm that would follow from the secret to the commonwealth or to private persons; indeed, a grave obligation to reveal the secret sometimes presses, especially by reason of the public good. Question II: Can you reveal a secret if you have promised to keep it even at the cost of your life? Answer: (1) Affirmatively, if the common good demands it, because a promise made against the common good is null; (2) negatively, if it concerns your own merely grave harm, because it is better to keep the secret promised by this special contract. More probably negatively even if it concerns your own extreme harm, because you expressly renounced your right, and it is not unlawful to omit the preservation of life in order to keep your promise. Nevertheless St. Alphonsus [l. III, n. 971, ed. Gaudé, II, 361] rightly says that the contrary is sufficiently probable.”—Reg. Iuris in VI° Decr. Bonifacii VIII, n. 69: “In evil promises it is not expedient to keep faith.”—Cfr. this Handbook, Vol. IV, p. 260, n. 16.

The obligation of keeping professional or official secrets rests upon fidelity, without which the social order could not exist, and can therefore be modified only by the exigencies of public welfare. b) Apart from the seal of confession, which, as we have said, binds absolutely and at all times, the obligation of keeping a secret ceases whenever there is a just cause or excuse for disclosing the same, that is to say, when the secret has become publicly known without the co-operation of him who knows of it, and the welfare of any of the parties concerned in it or the public interest require that it be revealed. This would be the case, for instance, if an innocent man were to suffer serious injury unless a secret were disclosed or if a criminal could be reformed by divulging it.

Generally speaking, the obligation of keeping a secret does not hold before the law if the secret involves matters which may not be legitimately concealed, e. g., unjust plots against others or against the commonwealth, abuses and faults which cannot be corrected without publicity, etc.

In such cases it makes no difference whether an oath is involved or not.

Parents, guardians, teachers, and other legitimate superiors are allowed, by opening letters or by other means, to procure a knowledge of things which their children or subjects illegitimately wish to conceal from them.⁴ The public authorities may, for reasons strong enough to justify the use of force, examine the correspondence of suspected persons.

⁴ Gury, Comp. Theol. Mor., I, n. 487: “The question is whether one sins gravely by opening or reading another’s letters. Answer: Affirmatively in itself. The reason is that by natural law and the law of nations there is an obligation to leave the secrets of letters inviolate; otherwise human intercourse would be ruined. Except the following cases: 1. If there is the tacit or presumed consent of the one who writes or of the one to whom the letters are sent; 2. if it is known or presumed that the letters contain matters of lesser importance; 3. if it is done for a just cause, e. g., to avert public or private harm; 4. if the letters are opened from levity or mere curiosity.”—Cfr. St. Alphonsus, Theol. Mor., l. V, n. 70 (ed. Gaudé, II, 755).

Much has been said of late against "secret diplomacy," and justly so: but the fact remains that every government is allowed, nay obliged, to keep secret certain things which cannot be divulged without danger to the common weal. But those in authority may not employ such secrets to cover dishonest transactions, or to create false opin- ions, or to spread lying reports, or to engage in mendacious propaganda either at home or abroad, nor, in general, use any means apt to injure or undermine the public confidence.

For the individual it is not only a command of natural, and especially of Christian, prudence, but it may even be a grave duty to refuse to be made the repository of secrets which do not concern him, or to pry into the secrets of others.

“The main art of keeping a secret is not to talk about it. If a man is asked an awkward question, and sees no alternative but to let out or lie, it is usually his own fault for having encouraged the questioner up to that point. A wise man lets drop in time topics of conversation which he is unwilling to have pressed. He is never the first to introduce such topics. It is said of the ploughman in Ecclesiasticus, that his story is of the sons of bulls—enarratio eius in filiis taurorum. After all, cattle have no secrets, but men and women have.”⁵

⁵ Joseph Rickaby, S. J., Political and Moral Essays, p. 221.

Without strict necessity, letters should not be opened, nor should family secrets be exposed, or if necessity demands that it be done, the duties enjoined by truth and fidelity should be strictly adhered to.

Parents, guardians, and superiors should be cautious in making use of their right to pry into the secrets of their subjects, for if this is done without a just cause, it will encourage rather than stop underhand dealing.⁶

⁶ Linsenmann, Moraltheologie, p. 440.

For the rest it is well to remember that, in the words of a famous German poet, “two things are a detriment to him who wishes to ascend the ladder of happiness: namely, keeping silence when it is time to speak, and speaking when it is time to be silent.”⁷

⁷ Fr. Bodenstedt.

A positively untrue statement or denial is illicit, and mere silence often creates unjustifiable suspicion. Consequently, as it is often necessary to keep a secret, both for the sake of individuals and of society at large, moralists have devised ways and means by which illegitimate or curious questions can be evaded without lying or dissimulation. Of these ways and means the principal ones are: a) Amphiboly (ἀμφιβολία, doubt) or equivocation (aequivocatio), i. e., the use of equivocal or ambiguous expressions with the intention of being misunderstood by others. Usually in an expression of this kind the words reflect the thoughts of the speaker in such a way as to admit of a meaning different from the one that lies on the surface. Hence the speaker is not really the author of the ensuing deception, but the deception is the fault of the hearer, who could have perceived the true meaning had he paid closer attention to the words employed. b) Mental reservation or interior restriction (reservatio sive restrictio mentalis) may be subdivided into two species, namely: α) Pure mental reservation (restrictio sive reservatio pure seu stricte sive proprie mentalis) is the restriction of one’s meaning to the proposition as modified by some addition made to it within the mind of the speaker, the literal sense of which, therefore (verbum oris), is true only under the conditions retained in the mind (verbum mentis),—as if one, on being asked whether he did a certain thing, were to answer “No,” meaning, “Not in the way in which the questioner thinks, or at the time he means, or under the conditions he imagines, etc.,”—modifications which cannot be gathered either from the tenor of his words or the circumstances of the case.

Such pure or strict mental reservations are downright lies, because they aim at deception and effectively undermine the mutual confidence without which society can not exist.⁸

⁸ Gury, Comp. Theol. Mor., I, n. 457: “It is never lawful to use a purely or properly mental restriction, nor an amphibology not perceptible in a human manner; much less is it lawful to swear with them, because it is simply a lie.”—Cfr. the propositions condemned by Innocent XI, supra. Joseph Mausbach, Catholic Moral Teaching, pp. 79 sqq.; New York 1914; A. Meyenberg, Die katholische Moral, 2nd ed., pp. 180 sqq.; A. Adloff, Katholische Moral und Sittlichkeit, Strasbourg 1901, pp. 22 sqq.

β) Mental reservation in a broader sense (reservatio non pure sive late seu improprie mentalis aut sensibilis) is practiced if words are employed which are capable of being understood in different senses, either because they are in themselves ambiguous, or because they derive a special meaning from the circumstances of time, place, or person in which they are spoken, or, to put it somewhat differently, if the speaker really means what he says, but expresses himself so guardedly that the person addressed can gather his true intention only by taking his words in connection with the circumstances of the case. Thus when a servant says that his master is “not at home,” the words may mean either that he is absent or that he does not wish to receive visitors.⁹ With this kind of reservation, therefore, the true meaning of the speaker is not contained in the bare words, but may and must be gathered from the meaning which the words acquire from the circumstances in which they are spoken. Consequently, broad mental reservation is merely a species of equivocation, which, though by some authors called internal reservation, is in reality not such, because nothing is concealed.¹⁰

⁹ Slater, Moral Theology, I, 468.

¹⁰ Gury, Comp. Theol. Mor., I, n. 456: “Equivocations or amphibologies are also referred to restriction; these are expressions having a twofold principal sense, but one more obvious and the other less so, or even one spiritual and the other literal.”

In English, which is not the language of a Catholic people, and in which words mean, not what we would have them mean, but what they commonly mean in educated non-Catholic society, equivocation denotes a practice which is certainly wrong, and carries all the guilt of lying. “What ordinary Englishmen call equivocation,” says Fr. Rickaby, “corresponds to that which Catholic divines know as pure mental reservation, and that is a cowardly fashion of lying. Where aequivocatio is mentioned with approval in a page of Latin casuistry, the word ought to be translated, broad mental reservation. To render it equivocation is to create confusion, just as much as if one should render the canonical appeal, peto apostolos, “I ask for the Apostles,” or the old French, entre chien et loup, “between a dog and a wolf.”¹¹

¹¹ Political and Moral Essays, pp. 217 sq.

Examples of aequivocatio are pointed out in Holy Scripture. Thus Abraham and Isaac represented their wives as their sisters,¹² Jacob deceived his father to obtain the paternal blessing, and Judith gained admittance to Holofernes’ tent by means of a ruse.¹³ But the statements concerned, with the exception perhaps of those attributed to Abraham and Isaac, though literally mendacia, are to be regarded rather as mysteria,¹⁴ and therefore prove nothing either pro or con with regard to the question under discussion.

¹² Gen. XII, 11–19; XX, 2, 11 sqq.; XXVI, 7; XXVII, 1–35.

¹³ Judith X, 12 sqq.

¹⁴ St. Augustine, Contra Mendac., c. XI, n. 24: “What Jacob did with his mother as instigator, so that he seemed to deceive his father, if it is considered diligently and faithfully, is not a lie but a mystery. If we call these things lies, all parables and figures signifying any things whatsoever, which are not to be taken literally but in which one thing is to be understood from another, will also be called lies—which be altogether far from us.” (Migne, P. L., XL, 533).—St. Thomas, Summa Theol., 2a 2ae, qu. 110, art. 3, ad 3.

In the New Testament, Christ Himself repeatedly employed broad mental reservation, as when He called John the Baptist “Elias,”¹⁵ when He said that the daughter of Jairus was “not dead but sleeping,”¹⁶ and when He declared that if the Jews would destroy “this temple” (meaning His body), He would raise it up again in three days.¹⁷ It sounded like a mental reservation when He said that “the Father is greater than I”;¹⁸ that neither the angels nor the Son know the day or the hour of the Last Judgment;¹⁹ or when He declared that He would not go up to Jerusalem, and then went up anyhow.²⁰ It is obvious, however, that by employing such ambiguous language, our Lord did not wish to conceal the truth, or to mask His real intentions, but merely to indicate that His words bore a deeper meaning than that which lay on the surface. All that can be concluded from the passages in question is that ambiguous language is not per se forbidden. Broad mental reservation, therefore, must not be unreservedly condemned as illicit.²¹ However, it is not allowable under all circumstances, but only when (a) it does not embody a positive untruth, as is supposed; (b) when the true nature of the statement is recognizable, and (c) when there is a morally justifiable reason for keeping a secret.²² Whenever, on the other hand, there is a positive duty to tell the truth, e. g., in taking an oath, testifying in court, making a contract, or instruct- ing others, and when there is no obligation of keeping a secret, equivocation or mental reservation may not be employed.²³

¹⁵ Matth. XI, 14.

¹⁶ Matth. IX, 24.

¹⁷ John II, 19.

¹⁸ John XIV, 28.

¹⁹ Mark XIII, 32.

²⁰ John VII, 8–10.

²¹ St. Augustine, Enarr. in Ps., V, n. 7: “Since it is one thing to lie and another to conceal the truth—indeed, one thing to speak falsehood and another to keep truth silent—if someone perhaps does not wish to betray a man even to this visible death, he ought to be prepared to conceal the truth, not to speak falsehood, so that he may neither betray nor lie, lest he kill his own soul for the body of another.” (Migne, P. L., XXXVI, 85).—St. Jerome, In Ezech., l. IV, c. 14: “He who questions fraudulently does not deserve to hear the truth, but is to be caught by his own heart.” (P. L., XXV, 118).—St. Bernard, Serm. in Ct., XLII, n. 6: “For the most part it is not expedient that everything we know about ourselves become known to everyone, and by the very charity of truth and truth of charity we are forbidden to wish that what would harm the one who learns it be made public.” (Migne, P. L., CLXXXIII, 900).

²² “‘What news, my Lord, from France?’ some one asked of a cabinet minister. ‘I don’t know,’ was the reply, ‘I have not read the papers.’ The story is Cardinal Newman’s. Here the sense of the I don’t know is restricted and reserved, internally in the mind of the speaker, and externally by the words added about the newspapers. It is a mental reservation of the broadest, such as no Pharisee could call a lie. Now suppose the reference to the papers omitted. It would still be very hard to call the I don’t know a lie. The reservation of official knowledge is still sufficiently apparent: no sensible man would expect that to be communicated by way of ordinary chitchat. Above all, when a topic has been forced upon one, and questions put that admit of no evasion, by an enquirer who has no right to ask, then surely any denial or disclaimer, however direct the form of words, must be qualified by the outward circumstances in which it is spoken. This qualification, unspoken, but not unsignified, will be, ‘secrets apart.’” (Jos. Rickaby, S.J., Political and Moral Essays, pp. 222 sq.)

²³ Gury, Comp. Theol. Mor., I, n. 457: “It is sometimes lawful for a grave cause to use restriction in a broad sense, that is, improperly mental restriction, and equivocal words from which the sense intended by the speaker can easily be understood. The reason is that this is not evil in itself, since one’s neighbor is not properly deceived, but his deception is permitted for a just cause; moreover, the good of society requires that there be a means of lawfully concealing a secret of great importance; sometimes no other means is available except equivocation or restriction in the broad or improperly mental sense. I said, for a grave cause, because if such restrictions were used without a grave and proportionate cause, no one could or would be willing to believe another; and this would result in the greatest harm to human society.”—Cfr. Kössing, Ueber die Wahrheitsliebe, pp. 112 sqq.

READINGS.—St. Alphonsus, Theol. Mor., l. III, n. 970–971 (ed. Gaudé, II, 360); l. III, n. 151–171 (ed. Gaudé I, 467 sqq.).—F. X. Linsenmann, Lehrbuch der Moraltheologie, pp. 438 sqq.—Aug. Lehmkuhl, S. J., Casus Conscientiae, Vol. I, 3rd ed., n. 972 sqq.—F. A. Göpfert, Moraltheologie, Vol. II, 7th ed., pp. 334 sqq.—Kössing, Ueber die Wahrheitsliebe, pp. 106 sqq.—V. Cathrein, S. J., Moralphilosophie, Vol. II, 5th ed., pp. 96 sqq.—P. Hötzel, Jakob und Esau, Munich 1881.—E. Recejac, De Mendacio quid senserit Augustinus, Paris 1897.—W. Protopopoff, Biblische alttestamentliche Fakta nach Beleuchtungen der hl. Väter und Kirchenlehrer, Kasan 1897.—J. Mausbach, Catholic Moral Teaching and its Antagonists, pp. 113 sqq.—M. Cronin, The Science of Ethics, Vol. II, pp. 77 sqq.—Jos. Rickaby, S. J., “The Catholic Doctrine of Lying and Equivocation,” in Political and Moral Essays, N. Y. 1902, pp. 215 sqq.—IDEM, Moral Philosophy, pp. 232–237.—J. E. Ross, C.S.P., Christian Ethics, pp. 264 sq., 140 sqq., N. Y. 1919.—J. H. Newman, Apologia, pp. 274 sqq., 349 sqq., 359 sqq.—J. Brodie-Brosnan, “Mental Restriction and Equivocation,” in the Irish Ecclesiastical Record, Dec., 1920, No. 636, pp. 461–469.