Background
Pope Benedict XV was born Giacomo Della Chiesa in Genoa on November 21, 1854. His father was the Marquis Della Chiesa.
Pope Benedict XV was born Giacomo Della Chiesa in Genoa on November 21, 1854. His father was the Marquis Della Chiesa.
After graduating from the University of Genoa, the young nobleman studied for the priesthood in Rome and was ordained in 1878.
The first three decades of his life in the church were spent as a Vatican diplomat, first in Spain, then in the Papal Secretariat of State in Rome. In 1907 Pope Pius X named him archbishop of Bologna. The red hat of a cardinal came in May 1914.
A papal conclave meeting during the early weeks of World War I chose the cardinal of Bologna pope on September 3, 1914. The war inevitably dwarfed Pope Benedict's other concerns between 1914 and 1918. He sought to mitigate the violence of the war, appealing in early 1915, for example, for an exchange of crippled prisoners of war. In his consistorial address of January 22, 1915, the new pope condemned the invasion of Belgium as a violation of justice, without, however, mentioning Germany by name.
Side by side with moral exhortations and humanitarian efforts, Benedict pursued a specific diplomatic policy. Preventing Italy from joining the belligerents became the first order of business. Italian participation in the war meant severing the Vatican from much of the Catholic population of Europe. The pope also entertained hopes of presiding over the peace conference, an impossible dream if Italy joined in the bloodshed. Thus Benedict pressed Vienna to make territorial concessions to the Italian government. During the last days of peace in May 1915, he told Italian Prime Minister Salandra that Austria would concede generously to Italy's demands, provided only that the Italian government held back a bit longer from declaring war.
Once Italy had entered the war, Benedict sought to negotiate a general peace. The uncomfortable isolation of the Vatican under wartime conditions was an obvious stimulus to action. Moreover, Benedict was particularly concerned to end the war before it destroyed the Habsburg monarchy, one of the leading Catholic powers in Europe and a long-time source of political support for the church.
By the close of 1916 the time seemed propitious for a Vatican peace initiative. Both the Central Powers and the United States had asked publicly that the belligerents state their war aims. After the particularly gruesome slaughter at Verdun and the Somme, Europe's peoples and governments seemed ready at last to lay down their weapons.
Quiet diplomacy in the spring of 1917 indicated that German Chancellor von Bethmann Hollweg might be willing to negotiate for peace, even if it meant a German evacuation of Belgium. The pope's peace appeal of August 1 was issued in part because Bethmann's fall from power seemed to be leading to a hardening of the German position. The appeal called on the belligerents to put their financial and territorial demands aside and to deal with one another on the basis of disarmament and international arbitration.
Benedict's call for a peace without victory stirred some interest in both the British and the German governments; but in the end, Germany would not make concessions to Belgium. It must be noted that, on the other side, France was hostile and the United States, just recently in April 1917 having entered the war, was uninterested. Once the war had taken on new intensity, with the Austro-German offensive at Caporetto (October 1917) and the great spring offensives of 1918, no further peace initiative was likely to get a hearing.
The greatest immediate effect of the peace appeal was felt in the Italian army. Even the common foot soldier knew that the pope had issued a condemnation of the war's “useless carnage." The partial collapse of the Italian forces in the wake of Caporetto found the army's rank and file repeating and perhaps acting on the pope's words.
Any hope that he would play a great role at the peace conference vanished long before the November armistice. The Vatican was not even invited to attend. Benedict himself had only a brief period to work in a Europe not tom by war. He died in Rome, January 22, 1922.