Pope Benedict XV was archbishop of Bologna, Italy, in June 1914 when the pistol shots of a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo murdered Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, and echoed throughout the world.
On Aug. 20, 1914, with World War I less than a month old, Pope Pius X died, and on Sept. 3, 1914, Benedict was elected pope, only four months after being created a cardinal.
Crowned on Sept. 6, 1914, he possessed the diplomatic experience that the conclave had wanted.
The first four years of Benedict’s seven-and-a-half-year papacy were to be consumed by his ultimately unsuccessful attempts to stop a war that he condemned as “the suicide of civilized Europe.”
Born Giacomo della Chiesa in Genoa 1854, the sixth child of an ancient but poor patrician family, Benedict was ordained in 1878, spent much of his life in the Vatican’s diplomatic service and became undersecretary of state in 1901.
In 1907, he became archbishop of Bologna.
As archbishop, della Chiesa spoke of the church’s need for neutrality and to promote peace and ease suffering, but his role as a peacemaker and conciliator came up against several obstacles that predated the war.
The conflict (“the Roman question”) between Italian state and church, which had existed since 1870, was unresolved.
Coolness between the Vatican and Russia stemmed from tensions with the Orthodox church, while the unification of Germany in 1870 had made it a dominant Protestant power in Europe, at the cost of Catholic Austria and thus lessening the Holy See’s influence.
Germany’s “Kulturkampf” had, among other things, banned religious orders, withdrawn state subsidies from the church, removed religious teachers from schools, imprisoned clergy, and when the training of priests reverted to the state, half of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.
In November 1914, Benedict published the first of his 12 encyclicals, Ad Beatissimi Apostolorum.
The greatest and wealthiest nations, he said, were “well-provided with the most awful weapons modern military science has devised, and they strive to destroy one another with refinements of horror.” Continue reading
Sources
- Vassallomalta
- Image: Times of Malta.com
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