For many fans and critics alike, Jorge Bergoglio’s papacy has been summed up in something he told a journalist when asked about homosexual priests: “Who am I to judge?”

Fans and critics took it to be an endorsement of ethical relativism. Bergoglio’s latest letter to seminarians is the clearest statement yet of the wrongness of that interpretation.

He never meant that judgement, informed by values, is to be suspended. The pope tells the seminarians that judgement should not be superficial. It should be judgement of the whole person, flesh and blood, someone to whom one listens.

Judgement should not be pronounced like a pat formula based on abstractions or isolated doctrines. It follows discernment in which two questions are asked. “Who am I [to judge]?” cannot be separated from “Who are you?”

That is the bare summary of a letter whose prosaic purpose is to argue for the benefits of reading literature – particularly for seminarians but, really, as the pope adds, for all Christians engaged in promoting the Gospel.

Before he knuckles down to offer a Christian ethos of free speech, Bergoglio briskly ticks off the pragmatic reasons for reading literature. Here he is back in the saddle as a young Jesuit teaching El Cid to reluctant high school students.

Don’t read anything you find boring. Read the stories and poetry that interest you, and soon you will find your imagination expanding, your tastes broadening, your vocabulary able to discern finer shades of experience.

The printed page asks you to collect yourself and enter a different world. Good literature will so engross you that, as you read, you will find yourself “being read” by the story itself.

You – with your unique bundle of experiences – will enter the story and, therefore, change it. And the story will change you. It will give you access to experience that is beyond your little world.

Literature teaches you to listen to another person’s voice, Bergoglio says, how to see through the eyes of others: “the weeping of an abandoned girl, an elderly woman pulling the covers over her sleeping grandson, the struggles of a shopkeeper trying to eke out a living, the shame of one who bears the brunt of constant criticism, the boy who takes refuge in dreams as his only escape from a wretched and violent life.”

Such stories change us because they stir something within. They also ask us to step outside ourselves to become companions of such characters.

Bergoglio underlines that, far from suspending values, training in such discernment strengthens our hold of them. We are taught “patience in trying to understand others, humility in approaching complex situations, meekness in our judgement of individuals and sensitivity to our human condition”.

True judgement is informed by wisdom. It is not a soulless absolutising of the law. Judgement without wisdom or perspective dehumanises the judge as well as the person judged.

Judgement without wisdom or perspective dehumanises the judge as well as the person judged- Ranier Fsadni

There is nothing in Bergoglio’s letter that smacks of the moral sanctimoniousness of a certain kind of liberal who exhorts non-judgmentalism. He names St Paul and a Church father, Basil of Caesarea, as his guides.

You should listen to the voices of others in order to enter the mysterious complexity of other people’s lives. You do not suspend judgement because other people have nothing to do with you. On the contrary, they are not strangers but the best way of encountering Christ with “a readiness to partake in the extraordinary richness of a history which is due to the presence of the Spirit”. The experience “redefines our humanity”.

Bergoglio has two predecessors, St Paul VI and St John Paul II, who addressed the role of art in understanding the mission of the Church. He cites them and his contribution can be seen as the third part of a triptych.

Paul VI addressed artists in the midst of the Church’s own liturgical crisis, in which new artistic expression needed to be found to convey the Gospel to 20th-century global society.

John Paul II spoke of art as the way in which a Christian nationalism could be expressed. A national artistic heritage helps us cultivate both an intense bond to national culture while opening us up to a universal artistic heritage.

Bergoglio, in turn, is addressing what a Christian ethos of free speech should be like in the age of social media and cultural silos.

First, listen before you speak. Listen creatively – not just to what is said but to what else lies in the voice of another. Judge the mystery of the person before you; judge your place within that mystery.

Do not let your judgement dehumanise you. Nothing human is lien to you; you should not be indifferent to anything human.

The way you look should be the opposite of the gaze of the tabloids and clickbait media. You do not pry in order to parade weakness. You do not name in order to shame. You gaze in order to acknowledge the complexity of what stands before you.

Nor do you speak in order to assert dominance over contrary opinions and shut them out. You speak in order to venture beyond your comfort zone. You should be ready to be changed.

For Bergoglio, the model of Christian free speech should be art: a creative word. It makes all things new because it changes relationships.

In this vision, Christian free speech undertakes the mission first entrusted to Adam: to name the world as it is. There is no shrinking from truth. But, for Bergoglio, you cannot utter the truth without being accountable for your own role in creating it.