On September 6, 1914, Giacomo della Chiesa was elected to the throne of St Peter at the age of 59. Benedict XV, as he became, was one of the youngest popes in history and the conclave of cardinals which elected him had found the man for the hour. The First World War had broken out a month before, and four years of his seven-and-a-half-year papacy were to be taken up by his doomed attempts to stop what he condemned as “the Suicide of Civilised Europe”, and then attempt to forge a lasting peace.
Born in Genoa in 1854 as the sixth child of an ancient but poor patrician family, and ordained in 1878, much of della Chiesa’s life had been spent in the Vatican’s diplomatic service. In 1901 he became Secretary of State and in 1907 succeeded to the archdiocese of Bologna. Archbishop della Chiesa had seen himself as a peacemaker, calling for neutrality, the promotion of peace and the easing of suffering.
However, even as Benedict XV there were obstacles in his way. Apart from the ever-increasing belligerence that would draw Italy onto the Allied side the next year, there was the unresolved “Roman Question”: the dispute between the Italian state and Church regarding the temporal authority of the papacy as ruler of a civil territory, in the context of Risorgimento. Meanwhile Vatican-Russian relations were chilly over tensions with the Orthodox Church, and German unification in 1870 had made it the dominant Protestant power in Europe.
The Church had fared badly at the hands of two of the major belligerents. German Kulturkampf had banned religious orders, withdrawn state subsidies from the Church, removed religious teachers from schools and imprisoned clergy. When the training of priests reverted to the state, half of the seminaries closed. In France the Church had forfeited property since the separation of Church and state in 1905.
The first of Benedict’s 12 encyclicals, <em>Ad Beatissimi Apostolorum</em>, published in November 1914, saw the greatest and wealthiest nations “well-provided with the most awful weapons modern military science has devised, and they strive to destroy one another with refinements of horror”. It continued: “There is no limit to the measure of ruin and of slaughter; day by day the earth is drenched with newly shed blood and is covered with the bodies of the wounded and of the slain.”
The encyclical repeated Christ’s exhortation that “a new commandment I give unto you: that you love one another”, and stated that, in particular, a lack of love and compassion fostered evil. Nationalism, racism and class conflict were seen as characteristics of the age, while the pope believed that war stemmed from “contempt for authority, the injustice in the relations between classes, the attainment of material goods made into the sole object of human activity, and the unrestrained striving after independence”.
Benedict’s role was more than exhortation. Prisoners of war were reunited with their families through a Vatican office which he opened. He asked neutral Switzerland to take in any combatants who were suffering from tuberculosis. 82 million lire was spent on relief work.
But the pope’s role as Universal Pastor brought its own problems. Italians tended to rally to the flag, with the country’s bishops largely supporting the war; some French clergy spoke of “Papa Boche”. Even in Protestant countries, there were large Catholic populations. This demanded a fine balance by Benedict to avoid alienating the faithful.
In July 1915 he explained, in the apostolic exhortation <em>Allorché fummo chiamati</em> – “to the people now at war and to their rulers” – that his neutrality “is appropriate to him who is the common father and who loves all his children with equal affection”.
Then began an active papal diplomacy, for two years later came the modestly titled A Peace Note, a seven-point plan that contained many of the earlier document’s proposals. Peace was linked to justice rather than military conquest. There was a demand for a cessation of hostilities, a reduction of armaments, a guaranteed freedom of the seas, international arbitration, while independence should be restored to Belgium and guaranteed “against any power whatsoever”.
Benedict also proposed that all sides forgo compensation claims (prescient, given what happened as a result of the later Versailles Treaty). However, the Allies saw this as favouring Germany, which had caused most of the damage in places like Belgium and France. Britain alone was willing to explore the possibilities laid out in the Note, but to France’s President Clemenceau the Note’s proposals were evidence that the Vatican was anti-French. Germany lost its initial interest when Russia’s collapse made German victory more likely.
In 1915 Woodrow Wilson, the American president, believed that peace was impossible and what Benedict was advancing was no more than a return to pre-war arrangements without tackling the situation which had led to war. Yet in January 1918 Wilson enshrined many of the Note’s proposals in his Fourteen Points for shaping the post-war peace.
But the Vatican had no place at the table at the Versailles peace conference; Italy had persuaded the victors to agree to exclude the Holy See because “the Roman Question” remained unresolved. Benedict saw the treaty as “vengeful”. As he had said in December 1918, three weeks after the Armistice, hostilities, slaughter and devastation had been suspended; true peace had not come. In 1920, the encyclical <em>Pacem, Dei Munus Pulcherrimum</em> sought international reconciliation. But the Holy See was also excluded from the League of Nations.
Empires had fallen, revolutions fomented, and a sixth of the world lay under Communism in the aftermath of four years of mass slaughter. Benedict believed that the Church needed to find a central place in this new, chaotic and uncertain world. One goal, then, was to create good relations between Church and state. In 1921, in his last allocution (a solemn address from the throne), he expressed the need for concordats with the new powers.
Benedict, assisted by Cardinal Pietro Gasparri, his Secretary of State, revived Vatican diplomacy. It ended the isolation of the Holy See and created the foundations for the international work of later popes. At his accession there were 14 nuncios; when he died there were 27, and the 16-year breach with France had been healed. He also created the Congregation for the Oriental Church and the Pontifical Oriental Institute, as a response to Communism in Russia. “The pope of missions” urged missionary societies to encourage the vocations of native clergy decades before this became the norm.
Benedict died unexpectedly of pneumonia in 1922 at the age of 67. Two years earlier the Muslim Turks had erected a statue in Istanbul to “the great pope of the world tragedy ... the benefactor of all people, irrespective of nationality or religion”. At his death flags were flown at half-mast on all government buildings in Italy for the first time for a pope’s death since 1870.
Benedict XV’s biographer, John F Pollard, calls him “the unknown pope”, and some historians of the First War, like Martin Gilbert and John Keegan, do not even mention him. Yet while his immediate diplomatic efforts did not succeed, he was a voice of reason at a time of universal madness and someone who shaped the world and the Church in the century ahead.
Terry Philpot’s <em>111 Literary Places in London That You Shouldn’t Miss </em>is published by Emons Verlag GmbH
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