Part II of a series of articles remembering Benedict XV’s efforts to stop the catastrophe of 1914 begins with the new Pontiff’s background and the Italian experience of being lured into Britain’s Great War.
Part Two – Italy and the Great
Part II of a series of articles remembering Benedict XV’s efforts to stop the catastrophe of 1914 begins with the new Pontiff’s background and the Italian experience of being lured into Britain’s Great War.
Part Two – Italy and the Great War
Giancoma Della Chiesa of Genoa became Pope Benedict XV only in September 1914. Giancoma Della Chiesa was born premature in 1854. He was small and had a limp – this led him to be called ‘il piccoletto’ the little one. Some have said that his lack of stature impeded his career.
Chiesa was taken under the wing of an aristocratic and pious Sicilian, Cardinal Mariano Rampolla del Tindaro. He went with Rampolla to Madrid and Rome as his understudy and gained valuable experience doing diplomatic work. In 1889 he went to Vienna to help sort out the affairs of Karl Leuger’s Christian Socialist Party.
When Leo XIII died at the age of ninety-three after a reign that lasted a quarter of a century, he did not leave an untroubled inheritance. Many cardinals wanted a shift towards the “pastoral”, a pope who was neither a “politician” nor a “diplomat”.
The high-profile candidate was instead the man who embodied the other line, that of direct continuity with Leo XIII. Rampolla, then Secretary of State was favourite. He wanted to cultivate friendship with France to protect the Vatican from the Italian State and his election was backed by most of the French cardinals. But he was opposed by Austria because of his policy in support of the aspirations of the Slavs who were causing unrest in the Balkans.. The Austrian emperor decided to make use of an ancient right of veto, granted to the great Catholic monarchies, to block the election of Rampolla.
Pius X was elected and Rampolla was given an unimportant position to keep him out of the way. He retired soon after. Chiesa, who was associated with Rampolla, was banished to Bologna by the new pope.
Chiesa was held back by his association with Rampolla and not made a Cardinal (Bologna’s bishop was usually a Cardinal). So when Pius died in 1914 Chiesa had only just been a cardinal for 3 months.
It was said that Pius X died of a broken heart at the outbreak of war. The conclave favoured Chiesa because choice was narrowed. No cardinal of a belligerent nation stood a chance. Italians who had served in belligerent capitals were also ruled out. Only an Italian or a Spaniard – neutrals – had a hope. Chiesa was felt to have the diplomatic skills necessary for a very difficult situation and he wasn’t an anti-modernist like the last pope.
Austrians would have vetoed Chiesa if Pius X had not abolished the veto in 1904 – they saw him as pro-French like his mentor, Rampolla.
The Irish Catholic continued its review of Benedict XV and World War I in its edition of April 25th 2005. This time, however, it enlisted the services of more intellectual weight in the shape of the Professor of Ecclesiastical History, Oliver Rafferty, at Maynooth.
Rafferty blames the lack of Vatican influence on the belligerents at the start of the Great War on Pius X’s (1903-14) efforts against the modernists (including Benedict) in the Church: “Part of the problem was that under Pope Pius X the political authority of the Papacy had, among non-Catholic powers, dropped to a very low ebb. This was partly as a result of the Modernist crisis, when the Vatican’s apparent rejection of attempts to reconcile Catholicism and a certain type of scientific inquiry, left many independent observers agog. The methods employed to stifle debate in the Church weakened the Church’s moral authority in a world now tearing itself apart by war. At one level, therefore the Holy See could not possibly hope to influence the activities of either the Central Powers or the Allies.”
This view is very much in conflict with what Francesco Nitti had to say about the influence of the Vatican (toward the end of Pius’s Pontificate in 1911). On the eve of the Great War the Pope, argued Nitti, was free for the first time to pursue a principled policy in line wit