Saint Mary Magdalene Catholic Church - Flint Texas

When I lived in Rome, I used to visit the Basilica of St Peter’s in the Vatican a few times each week. I would pray at the tomb of Pope John XXIII and ask him to guide me as I studied the history of our faith.  John was the only pope who was a history teacher. Not too far away is the monument of Benedict XV who died in 1922. His statue shows a man on his knees deep in anguished prayer. He was a small man and was not very handsome.  He looked like a typical Italian civil servant, small, swarthy and angular.  As I read more and more about this man, I began to have greater respect for this forgotten Pope of Peace.  

 When Joseph Ratzinger was elected pope, he took the name of Benedict out of respect for this little remembered pope.

As The European Powers geared up for the great War in September 1914, the cardinals of the Church met to elect a new Pope to succeed Pius X. They chose a veteran diplomat, Cardinal Giacomo della Chiesa of Bologna, as the successor to St. Pius X.

He had been Under Secretary of State for a while. But Della Chiesa's association with Rampolla, the architect of the policy of the previous pope Leo XIII (1878–1903) foreign policy, made his position under Pius X somewhat uncomfortable. He fell foul of the new Cardinal Secretary of State, Cardinal Merry de Val and was effectively exiled to Bologna. When the conclave voted to make him pope, Cardinal Merry de Val muttered to the cardinal beside him, “Questo e un disastro.” (This is a  disaster) to which his colleague replied sarcastically. “Per ti, Eminencia, per ti.” (For you Eminence, for you.) He was Archbishop of Bologna from 1907 until his election, but before that he had served most of his career in the diplomatic service and he  was known as a moderate and skilled negotiator whose temperment could not have been more different from that of Pius X.  His politics was also very different, being far more open to talking to the French Republic, something that Pius X had refused to do. Unlike his predecessor, De la Chiesa, who took the name Benedict XV, distanced himself and the papacy a little from the Hapsburgs of Austria  as  the Great War approached.

Benedict and Scholarship

 One of the victims of any form of fundamentalism is true scholarship. Certainly, during the reign of Pius X, Catholic academics and writers were terrorized by over-rigorous and over zealous defenders of the faith. Benedict had to do a great deal of repair with the academic community. Biblical scholars, in particular, were allowed greater freedom to publish. Scholars like Monsignor Duchesne were no longer under a cloud because they dared to write scholarly works of Church history. The general air of greater freedom was caught in a letter from an italian nobleman Marquis Filippo Crispolti, who wrote, “One now breathes more easily, the title ‘scholar’ no longer has negative implications, …. Monsignor Duchesne is no longer the bete noir, redress has been made to other victims of the fanatics, Benedict often speaks of the need to respect the authority of the bishops, … the words ‘integral or Papal’ Catholic are taboo, ….He always speaks well of non-Catholics.”

Benedict and the unity of the Church
The Church he inherited was deeply divided between  conservatives or integralists and more progressive Catholics whom Pius had labeled “Modernists”.  Benedict knew that he must create peace within the Church in the wake of the division of the anti-Modernist campaigns. Benedict's wrote an encyclical letter called “ad beatissimi” within a few weeks of becoming Pope. In this letter he asked Catholics to stop calling each other by pejorative terms such as ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’  and instead to dwell on what we share in common. "will that Catholics should abstain from certain appellations which have recently been brought into use to distinguish one group of Catholics from another. Such terms "are to be avoided, not only as 'profane novelties of words,' out of harmony with both truth and justice, but also because they give rise to great trouble and confusion among Catholics. .. There is no need of adding any qualifying terms to the profession of Catholicism: it is quite enough for each one to proclaim 'Christian is my name and Catholic my surname,' only let him endeavor to be in reality what he calls himself."

Committees of Vigilance

This appeal for calm was accompanied by his decision to disband all the committees which had been used by Pius X to spy on bishops all over the world. These Committees of Vigilance were secretly  constituted and the members were not known to the local bishop or priests. They made secret reports to the Vatican and there was no accountability in what accusations they made.  There was a lot of false reporting and the committees were composed of people with very conservative credentials. The Vatican denied that any such committees even existed and the system might never have been exposed if their files had not fallen into the hands of the German army during the war.

Many churchmen in America found that their careers were blocked by the accusations made by nameless accusers who could not be cross questioned. All they had to say was that a certain priest was a ‘Modernist’ a lover of the modern world and its thinking. The vindictiveness of the reporting is the saddest thing when you read the files today. It is a bit like the way we behave nowadays towards those we disagree with us!! Even the future Pope John XXIII was dragged to the Holy Office to be warned about his history classes. Cardinal de Lai warned him not to teach anything that showed a pope or saint in less than glowing terms.  John knew that he had been reported for being scientific in his historical studies and dealing with church history in a truthful way.  The day after becoming Pope in 1959, he demanded to see his file at the Holy Office so that he could find out who had betrayed him.

The central figure in these committees was a Monsignor Begnini. He was basically a spy-master, and was as sinister as that title suggests. Benedict himself knew that Begnini had had him followed and that he kept a secret file on him.  This Monsignor once described Cardinal Mercier of ‘being in league with all the worst traitors in the Church’.  He described Cardinal Rumpolla as ‘the Jules Verne of ecclesiastical politics, a dreamer and a megalomaniac.” On the day of his election, as the curial officials paid homage to the new pontiff by kissing his hand, Benedict gave an indication of future policy by deliberately withholding his hand from Monsignor Begnini. The campaign against the Modernists was immediately stopped, and Begnini was exiled. Cardinal Merry de Val was exiled at an unimportant vatican posting, much as Cardinal Law is nowadays.

World peace

One of Benedict XV's more memorable interventions in the wider arena was his "Note to the belligerent powers" of World War I -- the "Peace Note," which marks its 90th anniversary this week.  By the summer of 1917, America had joined the allies and the war was still not coming to an end.  Belgium was devastated because most of the fighting was on her territory.  The Germans had demanded  free passage through Belgium so that they could attack France. King Albert I, defied both the Germans and his own government by denying access to the German army.  “I rule a nation, not a road” he famously replied. Terrible stories of rape and murder against nuns had been put about by the British government in its propaganda campaign against the Germans.  Irishmen were being recruited to fight for ‘gallant little Belgium’.  Recruiting posters showed frightened nuns fleeing from brutal hun-like German soldiers.  Benedict and the Vatican were particularly sensitive to the plight of Catholic Belgium.  Benedict dispatched Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII to see the Kaiser to propose a peace deal.  But it was rejected by the Allies without much consideration. Woodrow Wilson remarked that “who does he think he is butting in for?” Lloyd George of England  did not even reply to the Pope’s letter. The French suspected the Vatican of being pro-Austrian and pro- German.

He proposed that the rule of law be restored and that the moral force of right replace the material force of arms. This needed to be done in three stages:

1.     first, fighting should be suspended;

2.     second, there should be a reduction in armaments “according to rules and guarantees to be established to the extent necessary and sufficient for the maintenance of public order in each State”;

3.      third, there should be international arbitration “on lines to be determined and with sanctions to be settled against any State that should refuse either to submit international questions to arbitration or to accept its awards”

He called for occupied territories to be restored, negotiations to settle territorial disputes, the free movement of peoples and common rights over the seas. Demands for reparations and indemnities should be renounced. In addition to the points already agreed in Germany, of note are the provisions for the renunciation of indemnities and the freedom and community of the seas; as can be seen Benedict set out detailed plans for negotiations in relation to Belgium, Poland, the Balkan states and Armenia. If his ideas had been accepted then we might never have had a Hitler or a holocaust.