All popes, even one like Benedict XV whose reign was so overshadowed by secular concerns, war and peace and the necessary papal diplomacy, must ultimately be judged by their record as supreme pastor of the Universal Church – their government of the Roman Catholic Church throughout the world, their promotion and defence of its interests, the efficient working of its hierarchy of charisms and functions and, above all, its expansion in the world in accordance with its self-proclaimed, historic mission, the evangelization of peoples.
As has already been seen, one of Benedict’s first concerns as Pope was to bring peace back to the Church after the anti-Modernist excesses of the previous reign (see Chapters 1 and 2). Though he was clearly not a Modernist himself, he rejected the methods that had been used by Pius X and his collaborators against the Modernists. But he had a no less elevated idea of the authority of his office than his predecessor. In Ad Beatissimi he talked of his role as ‘the Common Father of all’, and reminded his hearers of his unique office: ‘Us to whom is divinely committed the teaching of the truth.’1 He went on to say: ‘Therefore it is Our will that the law of our forefathers should be sacred: “Let there be no innovation; keep to what has been handed down.” In matters of faith that must be inviolably adhered to as the law; it may also serve as a guide even in matters subject to change but even in such cases the rule would hold: “Old things but in a new way”’2 It would seem that Benedict was exercising his natural caution. He was both reiterating a warning against the pursuit of the dangerous novelties of Modernism, and leaving the door open to further discussion of less contentious issues: a fairly sensible policy and one which was in line with that which he had pursued as Archbishop of Bologna. He was making it clear that he would countenance no deviation from accepted doctrine, nor did he himself intend to exercise his infallible power to introduce doctrinal innovations. The most obvious one would have been in relation to the Marian cult, the next development of which eventually took the form of Pius XII’s definition of the dogma of the bodily Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in 1950. Given that Benedict had led both a Bologna diocesan and Italian national pilgrimage to Lourdes before his election, the first Pope to do so, and that the apparition of our Lady of Fatima took place in 1917, such a step would have been entirely natural. But he seems to have been content with the ‘deposit of the faith’ as he had inherited it and as he understood it.
It is all the more significant, therefore, that Benedict was to devote his longest encyclical, Spiritus Paraclitus, of 1920, to the problems of biblical scholarship, for it seemed that such questions had been settled once and for all by Leo XIII’s encyclical Providentissimus Deus of 1893, which asserted the full, divine inspiration of the Scriptures, their inerrancy, the rejection of the distinction between relative and absolute truth in them and of the suggestion that the Bible was not historical fact.3 The warnings against Modernist interpetations of the Bible had been repeated by Pius X in Pascendi Dominici Gregis in 1907, and he had also set up a Pontifical Biblical Commission to hand down rulings on such matters. Benedict in his encyclical, which was ostensibly prompted by the recurrence of the anniversary of St Jerome, the father of the Church who devoted so much of his life to the study of Scripture, does more than just reiterate the line taken in Providentissimus Deus. ‘The pope was more negative in tone in his dealings with modern advances than Leo XIII had been and more strongly defensive on the historicity of the Bible’4 The most likely explanation for Benedict’s initiative in the field of biblical scholarship must be that he feared that his abandonment of the excesses of Pius X’s anti-Modernist campaign might send the wrong signal; that it might be interpreted as condoning the errors which both Leo XIII and Pius X had previously condemned. Another possible explanation may be found in the fact that the debate about Darwin’s theories of evolution had entered another, vigorous phase precisely in his reign. La Civiltà Cattolica, for example, devoted several articles to the question of ‘Evolution or the Stability of the Species?’ in 1919 and 1920 which, after presenting the scientific evidence both for and against, came out against evolution.5 Perhaps Benedict felt it necessary to re-assert the divine authorship, and the inerrancy of Scripture in these circumstances. What was novel about his encyclical, however, was the stress on the need to make the scriptures available to the faithful, and not just the Gospels, which was what commonly happened in the Church at that time, but the whole Bible.6 He strongly recommended the work of the Society of St Jerome, which was dedicated to just that end and which, he reminded his readers, he himself had founded.7 In part, he was probably seeking to respond to the long-established Protestant allegation that the Roman Catholic Church kept the Bible from the people.8 In this sense, Spiritus Paraclitus had positive results, but more broadly speaking its consequences were negative: it ‘froze’ Roman Catholic biblical scholarship until Pius XII reopened the subject with his encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu of 1943.
If there was a substantial continuity and identity of policy in the field of biblical studies between the pontificate of Benedict and that of his predecessor, there were clearly many differences in other fields, and the most striking difference was undoubtedly in the field of liturgy. Benedict issued no decrees on liturgy or liturgical discipline such as those of Pius X, whose insistence on frequent communion for the laity and on early communion for children was undoubtedly the most important development since the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century. Benedict was content to leave things be in this field. In the broader one of Catholic devotion, his only major contribution was an intensification of the cult of the Sacred Heart of Jesus: indeed his reign marks the high point of the development of that cult. In May 1915, he had consecrated all the nations involved in the war to the Sacred Heart,9 in May 1919 Spain was dedicated to the Sacred Heart with great pomp and ceremony10 and in October the Basilica of the Sacré-Cœur was consecrated in Montmartre.11 The new Catholic university instituted at Milan in Benedict’s reign was also dedicated to the Sacred Heart. To crown all his efforts, in May 1920, Benedict canonized Mary Margaret Alacoque, the Visitandine who had done so much to spread devotion to the Sacred Heart in the seventeenth century. One of the few churches which he is known to have been responsible for building was dedicated to the Sacred Heart – the burial church of his predecessor Cardinal Svampa in a suburb of Bologna and the one church which he raised to the status of a minor basilica was the church of the Sacred Heart in Castro Pretorio, Rome. Yet even here, in the area of popular devotion, Benedict had to be on his guard against attempts to exploit the cult for nationalistic ends during the war and after. In particular, in 1919 he sought to prevent the ambitious and energetic Padre Gemelli from distorting popular devotion in this way.12
In 1912, Pius X had established an Italian text of the catechism, which also went into use elsewhere. A few years later Benedict launched his project for a new, universal catechism. The particular concern which he had had for the teaching of the catechism as Archbishop of Bologna was a necessity dictated by the obstacles to religious instruction which he encountered in the state schools of his diocese. But his interest in the catechism endured beyond his stay in Bologna. In 1919, in his constitution Etsi Minime, he declared: ‘There is nothing more effective than catechetical instruction to spread the glory of God and to secure the salvation of souls.’13 Two years earlier, in March 1917, Benedict began the process of creating a universal text of ‘The Catechism of the Catholic Church’, by setting up a commission ‘for the compilation of the definitive text for a Catechism for the Universal Church’.14 Much like the commission which had laboured to produce the Code of Canon law, this commission was composed of experts but was to draw on the opinions of all the bishops.15 In his letter to the papal representatives throughout the world, Gasparri claimed that the decision to establish a universal catechism was prompted by the ‘horrible war still raging among the nations and the need to have clear, consistent teaching throughout the Catholic Church’.16 Almost all the bishops welcomed Benedict’s decision and deplored the confusion over existing texts.17 But Benedict did not live to see the fruits of his initiative. In fact, the Catechism of the Catholic Church was not published until 1993.
One of the major events in Benedict’s reign, and a landmark in the history of the Roman Catholic Church, was the promulgation of the Code of Canon Law on 27 May 1917: the Code actually came into force a year later.18 It had been Pius X’s idea to codify the very scattered and fragmentary sources of the public law of the Church, but the chief executors of the project had been Gasparri and Pacelli, his assistant as Secretary to the Commission entrusted with the task of codification. Indeed, the Code was one of Gasparri’s two major achievements, the other being the Lateran Pacts of 1929 which finally resolved the Roman Question. The effect of the Code was to re-inforce the authority of the Pope, and the Roman Curia, over the Church. In particular, it centralized still further the decision-making structures of the Church, especially in relation to the appointment of bishops. Along with Infallibility, it was a pillar of modern papal primacy. And it was in Benedict’s reign that Gasparri and his pupil Pacelli began their campaign to use concordats, that is treaties between the Holy See and other powers, as a means of effectively enforcing the writ of canon law inside states, the first major guinea pig of this policy being Germany.19 Benedict’s contribution to the implementation of the new Code, apart from encouraging the policy of Gasparri and Pacelli, was to set up a ‘Commission for the Authentic Interpretation of the Code of Canon Law’, and a school of canon law studies.20 The application of the Code as promulgated was restricted to the Latin Church, but it was also in Benedict’s reign that the first steps were taken towards creating a code of canon law for the Oriental-rite churches.
On 1 May 1917, Benedict established a new organ of the Roman Curia, the Sacred Congregation of the Oriental Church, separating it from Propaganda Fide, of which it had been a semi-autonomous part since January 1862.21 The new congregation was given jurisdiction over all matters affecting the Oriental Church, except those reserved to the Holy Office, the Congregation of Rites, the Congregation of Seminaries, the Secretariat of State and the Sacred Penitentiary. It is symptomatic of the importance which he attached to the new congregation that Benedict made himself its prefect or head, a fairly unusual practice, demonstrating his concern for both the Eastern churches in communion with Rome and those, the schismatic or ‘Orthodox’ churches, which were not. By the middle of his successor’s reign, the jurisdiction of the new congregation had been confirmed as covering all ‘uniate’ churches, and in territorial terms, southern Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Cyprus, the Dodecanese Islands (under Italian rule), the successor states to the Ottoman Empire, Iran, Egypt, Eritrea and Northern Ethiopia: in all of these areas, there was a complicated mix of schismatic churches, uniate churches and small communities of Latin Catholics.22 While Benedict was ultimately concerned with the great goal of the hoped-for reunion of the schismatic churches, for which he had instituted a prayer in 1916,23 his initial concerns were about defending the rights, and in some cases the existence, of the eastern branches of the Roman Catholic Church.
At the outset of Benedict’s pontificate, the Roman Catholic Church had counted roughly three hundred million adherents world-wide: of these, the non-Latin-rite Catholics amounted to six and a half million.24 Yet of all the Christians in communion with the Holy See, these groups had suffered worst from the vicissitudes of the First World War. We have already considered the appalling death and suffering inflicted upon the Armenians (see p. 116), but as Benedict pointed out in his consistorial allocution on the Oriental Church in 1919, Catholics, and in broader terms, all the Christians of Lebanon, Syria and Mesopotamia had suffered very badly under Ottoman rule: Churches, schools and other ecclesiastical property had been destroyed and confiscated, both clergy and laity had been persecuted, and in some cases imprisoned, and many of them had been murdered.25 This was the result of what Andrea Riccardi describes as the breakdown of multi-religious coexistence in the Ottoman Empire during the course of the First World War; another example of the unfortunate consequences of nationalism.26 For the Vatican in the months immediately following the end of the First World War, the future for Catholicism in the Middle East looked very bleak indeed.
Benedict’s allocution of 1919, with its slightly hysterical worries about both Jewish and Protestant activities in Palestine, against a background of continuing uncertainty about the political future of that and other ex-Ottoman territories, has to be read in this context. He made strenuous efforts to help these Christian, mainly Catholic, communities both before the end of the war and after, in particular, he sent considerable financial aid.27 His encyclical of October 1920, elevating St Ephraim the Syrian, deacon and anchorite, to the honour of Doctor of the Church, though produced in response to the request of Eastern patriarchs and bishops, was clearly intended as a means of heartening and encouraging these communities, and Eastern Catholics in general. In addition, it was a less than subtle reaffirmation of the primacy of Peter and his successors over the whole Church, as even its title Petrus Princeps Apostolorum (Peter, Prince of the Apostles) demonstrates. This was a moment when Rome and the Pope needed to mobilize all their resources in defence of their Eastern brothers.
During the course of the war, the Roman Church had faced other threats in the east, the most serious of which being the clear intention of Czarist Russia, once it had finally defeated the Ottoman Empire, to take over both the Straits and Constantinople itself.28 What it thus proposed to accomplish was the definitive establishment of Constantinople as a strong centre of Orthodox, Slav Christianity, with Santa Sophia, cleansed of its centuries of use as a mosque, restored as its symbol. In such circumstances the rivalries between Latin and Orthodox Christianity, between the ‘two Romes’, would be revived, and to Catholic Rome’s political disadvantage once Russia had established its expected hegemony in Eastern and South Eastern Europe following the defeat of the Central Powers. Gasparri had repeatedly protested against the support of the Entente Powers for Russia’s ambitions on the Bosporus (see pp. 90–1). A related worry was about the extension of Orthodox influence and control over the holy places of Palestine in the wake of an Ottoman defeat. When the Russian threat to Constantinople seemed finally to be receding in January 1917, Gasparri rejoiced that ‘this would mean that there would be a great sign of the cross over Constantinople, and that Russia would be forced to sing the [famous] Neapolitan song, “Goodbye, beautiful Naples, goodbye, goodbye”.’29
Gasparri’s rejoicing must have appeared a trifle premature when a new, albeit less serious, threat appeared at the end of the war. Greece, having finally been dragged into the hostilities on the side of the victorious Allied powers, now believed that her moment had come, that the Megali Idea (literally, ‘the great idea’) of winning back Constantinople from the Turks, and much of Eastern Anatolia, the home of large Greek-speaking communities, was becoming possible as well.30 In this way, the Byzantine Empire would be resurrected on the ruins of the Ottoman Sultanate and Caliphate which had destroyed it. Greek control of Constantinople would also have led to a resurgence of Orthodoxy, a revitalization of its resources in competition with Rome. The reconversion of St Sophia was as central to the Megali Idea as it was to Russian designs on Contantinople and furthermore had much support in Britain.31 But it would also have been a slap in the face for the Vatican as this Anglican enthusiast of reconversion explained in 1919:
The traditional diplomacy of the Vatican has certainly laboured for decades under the influence of what would happen if the Oecumenical Patriarch, a dangerous witness against Roman claims, even when half-buried in the slum of Phanar and paralysed by Turkish tyranny, should emerge and be the symbol of a great and progressive Communion which functioned with glorious St Sophia’s as its mother church.32
The Vatican on the Tiber was saved the nightmare of a rival, Orthodox ‘Vatican’ on the Bosporus by the objections of the British Foreign and India offices, who feared the effects of desecrating a mosque in the city of the Caliph on the Muslim populations of the British Empire, and by resurgent Turkish nationalism, with diplomatic support from Benedict and Gasparri.33 The Treaty of Sèvres of August 1920, of which Gasparri thoroughly disapproved, gave Greece much of what it desired: the rest could be taken by force of arms. Was not the Greek king, although of Danish and German origins, himself called after the founder of the great Christian city of the East? But in 1922 the Greeks suffered a terrible defeat in Anatolia and lost Smyrna at the hands of Turkish armies led by Kemal Ataturk, and King Constantine went back into exile.34 Once more, Rome had been spared.
In fact, even before the end of the war, Rome seemed to be about to win new victories over Orthodoxy. Benedict and Gasparri entertained high hopes that the ‘schismatic’ churches of both Bulgaria and Romania would turn to Rome in the wake of Russian defeats in the Balkans, and that Russia too might be converted. In September 1917, Benedict confided to Carlo Monti that ‘it is not improbable that Romania and Bulgaria will unite with Rome’, and again in July 1918, he told him that talks towards this end were actually in progress.35 It is really very difficult to understand on what the Vatican had built its hopes: the only possible basis for such an unlikely change was the fact that the King of Bulgaria was a Catholic and that, as the head of a defeated state, he might now in some sense see adherence to Rome as a way of currying favour with the victorious powers. As far as Romania was concerned, the Hohenzollern dynasty, and therefore the church system, looked set to stay. And Benedict’s establishment of a seminary for Romanian Roman Catholics in Santa Susanna in Rome in 1920 was a confirmation of that.36 Not even increased Italian influence in the Balkans was likely to change the religious situation there, so all of these hopes came to nothing, but one big, bright hope remained for some years to come – the conversion of Russia.
The conversion of Orthodox Russia, like that of Protestant England, was one of the great hopes of the Roman Catholic Church. It was Pius IX who had given instructions for regular prayers for the conversion of Russia. They were more than necessary because during the course of the nineteenth century relations between Rome and St Petersburg had deteriorated, and with them the lot of Catholics in Russia.37 The stolid hostility of the Orthodox Church was the main impediment to better relations, hence the refusal of Russia to admit a nuncio, and the Polish uprising of 1863 only made things worse. The czars became even more suspicious of their Catholic subjects and the Vatican’s communication with the Catholic bishops in the Russian Empire was rendered more difficult.38 Worse was to come: the Russian conquest of Austrian Poland – Galicia – in the early part of the First World War led to persecution of the Uniate Church there, its metropolitan being imprisoned and church buildings handed over to the Orthodox Church.39 The fall of Czarism in the February Revolution of 1917, therefore, brought a glimmer of light: Gasparri expressed optimism to Monti about the future of the Roman Catholic Church in Russia.40 The Kerensky government’s offer to establish reciprocal relations with the Vatican strengthened these hopes.41 Even the ascent of the Bolsheviks to power in October 1917 did not dim the optimism in the Vatican. While it meant the beginning of an official campaign of militant atheism, against all religions, the separation of Church and State decreed in January 1918 seemed to be positively advantageous to Catholicism: given the centuries-long dependence, not to say subservience, of the Orthodox Church to the Russian State, with disestablishment it seemed likely that it would wither and decline.42 The reports of Baron Ropp, Archbishop of Vilna (Lithuania), who actually declared that ‘the great masses of Russians were more and more inclined towards recognition of the Roman Pope’, undoubtedly fed the Vatican’s unrealistic hopes about the possibility of improving relations with the Bolsheviks.43 This much is clear from the various articles about the religious situation in Russia, which appeared in La Civiltà Cattolica in 1919, yet it is surprising considering that at roughly the same time, articles were also appearing in the same journal about the persecution of the Church under the short-lived Soviet regime in Hungary.44
Apart from the unremitting ideological hostility of the Bolsheviks towards Catholicism, two problems stood in the way of Catholic advances in Russia. One was the fact that the bulk of the Catholics in the territories of the old Russian Empire were minority peoples – Poles, Ukrainians and Lithuanians. The Vatican’s relations with the new Catholic states of Lithuania and Poland were already difficult and complicated enough, as Benedict’s envoy in the Baltic successor states, Mgr Ratti, found to his cost,45 but in the eyes of the Russians Catholicism was equated with Polishness. The Vatican was also, inevitably, seen as a dangerous ‘foreign power’. Nevertheless, 1921 brought renewed hope that something could be achieved. The ‘miracle on the Vistula’, when the Red Army was defeated outside Warsaw and the worsening economic conditions in Russia, which resulted in both famine and the New Economic Policy, forced a softening in Lenin’s attitude towards various religious groups.46 As a result, the last months of Benedict’s reign saw the ‘Voronski Affair’, when the Soviet trade representative in Rome negotiated a deal with Mgr Pizzardo, the Sostituto, to allow Catholic clergy into Russian territory in order to administer famine relief and ‘promote moral and religious education’ in return for the Vatican’s de facto recognition of the beleaguered Soviet regime.47 Gasparri also seems to have believed that the Bolsheviks saw the agreement as a means of isolating and weakening the Orthodox Church: ‘And here one sees the hand of Providence.’48 It is said that among the last words that Benedict uttered were these: ‘Have the visas come yet from the Bolsheviks?’49 The illusions which Benedict and Gasparri nurtured about the prospects for the ‘conversion’ of Russia lived on into the next pontificate: Papa Ratti (Pius XI) did not abandon all hopes of coming to terms with the Bolsheviks until 1929.
In his first encyclical, Ad Beatissimi, Benedict expressed ‘a loving desire for the salvation of the whole world’.50 For other popes, this might have been only a normal, necessary, ritual acknowledgement of the evangelizing mission of the Church at the commencement of their reigns, but for Benedict it was something very much more than that. Neill speaks of ‘Three great missionary popes, Benedict XV, Pius XI and Pius XII’.51 It is strange that he does not include Leo XIII, for the last nineteenth-century Pope was also deeply committed to the missions and wrote four encyclicals on the subject: indeed, it is likely that Benedict was inspired in his efforts to promote a native clergy by Leo’s encyclical Ad Extremas, which addressed that very subject in the restricted area of the Indian subcontinent.52 While Benedict had inherited a flourishing missionary situation at the beginning of his reign, by the end of the war the situation was rather different. Because of the war, many missions had been abandoned by their sponsors in the war-torn European powers; in any case, the need for service chaplains and the deaths of many priests depleted the ranks of those who, in the normal course of events, would have gone out to reinforce the missions in Africa, Asia and Oceania.53 A further problem was the fate of the missions in the former German colonies: the Belgian, British and French governments, who acquired most of these territories under the system of League of Nations ‘mandates’, were anxious to expel the German missionaries in order to remove their influence.54 Benedict and Gasparri took the threat so seriously that they sent Mgr Cerretti, the Sostituto, to the Versailles Conference to lobby the ‘Big Four’, with success (see pp. 142–3). The problem of nationalist, colonialist interests seeking to exploit missionary work was to remain for a long time after the war. European colonialism could be beneficial to missionary activity; colonial powers tended to favour missionaries as supporters of white European cultural superiority and authority. It was for this reason that France in the early twentieth century did not pursue in its colonies the anticlerical policies which reigned at home.55 On the other hand, nationalism and colonialism could be, as Pius XI was to say, ‘a calamity for the missions, indeed it would be no exaggeration to say it is a curse’.56 Benedict would never have been so bluntly outspoken as his successor, but he had ample reason to share his sentiments during the course of his pontificate.
While, as we have seen, Gasparri was not averse to playing off one colonial power against another in furtherance of the Vatican’s interests in the Middle East (see p. 148), the attempts by the powers to exploit missionary activity could cause difficulties and embarrassment for the Holy See. The Italian government, for instance, was anxious to assert its claim to parts of Anatolia by sending Italian missionaries, Franciscan friars and Salesian sisters there, a policy which Monti sought to persuade the Vatican to accept, though the missionary Congregation of Propaganda Fide was less than enthusiastic.57 Indeed, it is clear that in general terms, Monti was used by the Italians to push a policy of aligning the interests of the Vatican with those of Italy in the Near and Middle East.58 The French also vigorously pursued their colonial interests at the Vatican, even before the resumption of diplomatic relations in 1920. In late 1918 their unofficial representative pressed the case for the appointment of a French auxiliary bishop to the (Italian) Latin patriarch of Jerusalem.59 The British also sought to safeguard their interests: in 1915 they asked that the next Bishop of Fort Victoria in the Seychelles should be an Englishman in order to consolidate their rule in the former French colony and in 1917 they asked that the heads of Catholic religious houses in Egypt (who were mostly Italian) should all be British.60 But the most outrageous assertion of national, colonial interest over the interests of the Universal Church was the obstruction which the French, supported by other European imperial powers, placed in the path of the establishment of relations between China and the Holy See; they feared it would diminish the influence which they exerted in that country through their ‘protectorate’ of the missions there, and by association the status of the ‘unequal treaties’.61 The Vatican on the other hand, would have preferred to see this protectorate lapse, as the French protectorate over Christians in the Ottoman Empire had disappeared upon the latter’s collapse, and to defend its missions and missionaries through the strength of its own diplomatic efforts, rather than rely upon the help of secular governments. Cerretti’s success in dealing with the missionary question at Versailles in 1919 suggests that the Holy See now had the international prestige and stature to make such a policy work.
Benedict’s missionary policy was not only directed towards escaping the entanglements of nationalism and colonialism. It was much more radical than that; it was designed to prepare for nothing less than the post-colonial future of the Church in Africa, Asia and Oceania. His apostolic letter on the missions, Maximum Illud (‘On the Propagation of the Catholic Faith throughout the World’) of November 1919 did indeed warn of the perils of nationalism and colonialism. In particular, he highlighted the dangers of the missionary serving the interests of his own country: ‘Without a doubt, his whole work will become suspect’, the native will think that ‘Christianity was only the religion of a given nation … and that he must submit himself to that nation … We must never forget that the missionary is an envoy not of his own country but of God.’62 But the main thrust of Maximum Illud was the call to missionary orders and institutes and to the whole Church to cooperate in the formation of a native priesthood and native episcopacy in as many countries as possible, so that they might one day assume the government of local churches: ‘Once the indigenous clergy has been formed, then the Church has been well-founded and the task of the missionaries has been accomplished.’63 And Benedict was critical of the failure of missionaries in a number of countries to form a native clergy ‘despite long years of missionary activity, and the work of the seminaries in Rome’.64 Having in mind perhaps the persecution of Chinese Christians during the Boxer Uprising in China, and nineteenth-century Ugandan martyrs whom he beatified in 1920, Benedict argued that ‘if persecution comes, a native church will have a better chance of survival’.65 Sadly, China was to prove him right on this score. Under the influence of the Belgian missionary, Fr Lebbe, who was one of the main advocates of an ‘indigenization’ policy, he and his vigorous new prefect of Propaganda Fide, the Dutch Cardinal Von Rossum, sent Mgr Celso Constantini to China as Apostolic Delegate with the specific task of laying the foundations of a native Chinese episcopate.66 The resistance of the white missionaries was strong, and it was not until 1924 that Pius XI, who would brook no further prevarication in the matter, consecrated six Chinese bishops in St Peter’s.67 Unfortunately for the Roman Catholic Church in China, the process of creating a native priesthood and episcopate was not sufficiently advanced when the Communists established their People’s Republic in 1949 and embarked upon their persecution of religion. The expulsion of foreign missionaries which followed left the Church seriously short of manpower.
Benedict followed his words in Maximum Illud with eminently practical measures. He reorganized studies at the college of Propaganda Fide to provide practical training for future missionaries, including the improvement of language teaching; he founded the Ethiopian College in 1919 for the training of clergy for that country, and he encouraged the spread of missionary ‘support’ societies, such as the Clergy Mission Association, throughout the Church, bringing Angelo Roncalli to Rome to organize fund-raising. Roncalli was to go on to greater things, ending up being elected Pope John XXIII in 1958.68 Maximum Illud was the most important Church document on the missions until the Second Vatican Council, and the most significant papal pronouncement on the subject until Paul VI’s encyclical Evangelii Nuntiandi in 1976. Taken together with Benedict’s other measures it constituted a veritable revolution in the mission field, as several historians have pointed out.69
Like most Italian priests of his generation, Benedict was notoriously anti-Protestant. According to Carlo Falconi, it was from his tutor Franzelini that he acquired his ‘strong distaste for Protestantism’.70 The protests of the Vatican against Protestant propaganda and proselytism in Italy, and especially Rome, grew more and more vociferous as his pontificate progressed. The Jesuit organ was particularly exercised by the rise of the Protestant ‘peril’ in Italy. In a report of May 1919, it made the point that adherents to Protestantism in Italy before the war had doubled and after it, certain factors encouraged further growth: tourism, return migration – especially from the United States – and the well-funded activities of highly organized British and American religious groups.71 While admitting the good material works done by Protestant organizations both during and after the war, through the opening of recreational facilities for soldiers, and schools, colleges, orphanages, nursing or convalescent homes, and student and youth hostels – the YMCA and the YWCA – La Civiltà Cattolica complained that the British and American organizations that funded them were only doing so in order to draw Italians away from Catholicism.72 It does not seem to have occurred to the editors of the journal that the Pope’s famine relief work in Russia might also be interpreted as an aggressive attack upon the Orthodox Church there … or that the work of the Foreign Missions board of the US Protestant churches, which it alleged was deliberately directed at European Catholic countries like France, Belgium and Italy, could be fairly compared to the missionaries whom Benedict sent to Russia from 1917 onwards.73 But this was still an age in which the Roman Catholic hierarchy believed that ‘error has no rights’.
Given Benedict’s attitudes towards both Orthodox schismatics and Protestant heretics, it is ironical that the period of his reign should have been characterized by such strong ecumenical activity in other Christian churches. During the course of the reign, the Vatican was approached by leading Protestants involved in a number of initiatives aimed at bringing about closer relations between the Christian churches, a movement to which the First World War lent an especial urgency. In the summer of 1914, the American Episcopal Church made an approach for Vatican support for its project of a World Christian conference: Gasparri’s reply came too late to be of much value because the outbreak of the war banished all hopes of a meeting, but it established the pattern for all such exchanges. The Cardinal Secretary of State, on the Pope’s behalf, was politely vague but ended by reasserting that Benedict as Pope was the ‘one to whom all men have been given over to be fed, [is] the source and cause of all unity in the Church’.74 In March 1918 it was the turn of the Scandinavian Lutheran metropolitans – the Bishops of Oslo and Zealand and the Archbishop of Uppsala – to invite the Vatican to be represented at a conference to bring about peace to be held at Uppsala. Though Archbishop Soderblom was flattering in his letter, ‘The Pope speaks in the name of the whole Church when he champions peace’, it elicited much the same reply as previous invitations.75 The leaders of the American Episcopal Church returned to the fray in 1919 when they sent another letter to Gasparri inviting the Vatican to participate in the founding of a ‘World Conference on Faith and Order’, the precursor of the World Council of Churches. Gasparri passed on the letter to Merry Del Val in his capacity as Secretary of the Holy Office, the guardian of the faith of the Church; not a very propitious choice in view of Merry Del Val’s hostility to Anglican orders.76 The answer (in Latin) was inevitably negative. The Episcopalians did not give up: further correspondence in April 1919 elicited the reply from Gasparri that: ‘You may rest assured that the Holy Father will pray that the Holy Spirit will enlighten the minds and acts of all those who labour today for the reunion of Christendom – that they should acknowledge the centre of unity and rally around the same.’77 In the Italian drafts written in Gasparri’s own hand, and in the first English draft, the final words are ‘rally around the Throne of Peter’.78 Even that did not deter them, and in May the Episcopal Church sent a delegation to Rome, led by the Bishop of Chicago. It was received in audience by the Pope who treated the delegates with great courtesy, but the answer was still the same: ‘Everyone knows of the Catholic Church’s position, and therefore it will not be possible for Us to take part in such a Congress or send a delegation’: he added in his kindly way that he did not want to disappoint them and prayed that they would see the light.79 In this episode, the Vatican’s behaviour may have been made more rigid by the suspicion that Anglicans and Orthodox were getting closer together.80 All of this was, of course, entirely predictable; the Roman Pontiff, fortified by infallibility, was not at all likely to allow the character of the ‘One, True Church’ to be compromised by dealings with heretical bodies, however well-intentioned. As with the individual cases of England and Russia, all that Catholics could do was wait and pray that one day all non-Catholic Christians would be reconciled to Rome.
In the light of these episodes it is all the more extraordinary, therefore, that the ‘Malines conversations’ of 1922 to 1926, between Catholic representatives, led by Cardinal Mercier, and Lord Halifax and other Anglicans, should have had their origin in Benedict’s reign. The answer to the puzzle lies with Cardinal Mercier, whose heroic wartime role had established him as a figure of world stature in the Allied countries. In October 1919, for example, he received a standing ovation at the General Convention of the United States Episcopal Church.81 Though Benedict had not always seen eye to eye with Mercier on the methods he used during his four-year struggle with the German occupying authorities (see p. 95), he had immense respect and admiration for the Belgian cardinal. It was Mercier who proposed to Benedict in December 1920 that he should host discreet discussions in his see city between theologians from the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches; in fact, he originally suggested inviting representatives of the Orthodox and other Protestant churches as well.82 Ironically, under Mercier’s influence, the Malines initiative was more readily accepted in the Vatican than it was at Lambeth. The Archbishop of Canterbury was very cautious in giving his blessing to the conversations for fear of offending the Evangelical wing of his church.83 Inasmuch as the first exploratory discussions were held at Malines from 6 to 8 December 1921, it can be said that it was under the aegis of Benedict that the modern ecumenical movement was initiated in the Roman Catholic Church.
With the exception of his strategy for the missions, Benedict’s government of the Roman Catholic Church was not marked by revolutionary initiatives. Yet he left it a stronger and more prestigious institution in the world than he had found it. He had done much to rescue and revitalize the Uniate Catholic churches of the Near East and he had laid the foundations for the Church’s future success in Africa and Asia. Above all, he had succeeded in healing the divisions caused by the anti-Modernist campaign of his predecessor, and to some extent, those caused by the war. Within the Church itself, at least, he had brought back peace.
1. Carlen (ed.), vol. 4, pp. 143 and 145.
2. Ibid., p. 149.
3. For the text of Providentissimus Deus, see ibid., vol. 3, pp. 325–39.
4. Brown et al. (eds), The New Jerome Biblical Commentary, p. 167.
5. See La CC, 71, 3 (1920), pp. 136 and 338, and 4 (1920), p. 137.
6. Carlen (ed.), vol. 4, p. 186.
7. Ibid.
8. La CC, 71, 3 (1920), p. 427.
9. Morozzo Della Rocca (1996), p. 562.
10. La CC, 70, 2 (1919), p. 459.
11. Morozzo Della Rocca (1996), p. 562.
12. De Giorgi, p. 455.
13. Carlen (ed.), vol. 4, p. 33.
14. AAES, Stati Ecclesiastici, 1432, pp. 574–81, ‘Testo Unico del Catechismo per la Chiesa Universale’.
15. Ibid., circular 27805 to papal representatives, 10 March 1917.
16. Ibid., Latin text of the letter to diocesan ordinaries, 18 March 1917.
17. Ibid., replies.
18. New Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. III, Can–Col, p. 973.
19. See Stehlin (1983), pp. 368–412.
20. New Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. III, Can–Col, p. 974.
21. AP, 1948, p. 733.
22. Ibid.
23. Holmes, p. 27.
24. AAES, Stati Eccl., 602, p. 42. Statistiche delle religioni nell’Est-Europa.
25. La CC, 70, 2 (1919), p. 6.
26. A. Riccardi, ‘Benedetto XV e la crisi della convivenza multireligiosa nell’Impero Ottomano’, in G. Rumi (ed.), Benedetto XV e la Pace, 1914–1918.
27. Dalla Torre, p. 1298.
28. Diario, I, pp. 248–9, 16 July 1915 and pp. 275–6, 2 October 1915.
29. Ibid., II, p. 475, 31 May 1919.
30. Goldstein, p. 39.
31. Ibid., p. 46.
32. As quoted in ibid., p. 48.
33. Ibid.
34. Woodhouse, pp. 207–10.
35. Diario, II, p. 10, 11 January 1917.
36. Ibid., pp. 208–9.
37. For an account of relations between Russia and the Roman Catholic Church in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Stehle (1981), pp. 12–14.
38. Stehle (1981), p. 15.
39. Ibid.
40. Diario, II, p. 151, 20 September 1917 and p. 346, 3 July 1918.
41. Ibid., 2 May 1920.
42. Diario, II, p. 61, 26 March 1917.
43. Stehle (1981), p. 5.
44. See for example La CC, 70, 2 (1919), pp. 167–8 and 72, 1 (1919), pp. 117–20 and 481–5.
45. Stehle, pp. 19–20.
46. Ibid., p. 26.
47. Ibid., pp. 27–30.
48. Diario, II, p. 570, 4 January 1922.
49. As quoted in Stehle (1981), p. 29.
50. Carlen (ed.), vol. 4, p. 143.
51. Neill, p. 518.
52. Carlen (ed.), vol. 3, pp. 307–9.
53. La CC, 70, 2 (1919), p. 10.
54. See V. De Marco, ‘L’intervento della Santa Sede a Versailles in favore delle missioni tedesche’, in G. Rumi (ed.), Benedetto XV e la Pace, 1914–1918, pp. 65–83.
55. Rhodes, p. 212.
56. As quoted in Pollard (1985), p. 89.
57. Diario, II, pp. 496–7, 30 October 1919.
58. Ibid., pp. 500–1, 9 November 1919.
59. Ibid., p. 374, 1 September 1918.
60. Ibid., p. 225, 15 December 1917; see also PRO, FO, 371/169966, De Salis to Curzon.
61. Leung, p. 43.
62. La CC, 70, 4 (1919), pp. 492–3.
63. Ibid., p. 490.
64. Ibid.
65. Ibid.
66. Leung, p. 45.
67. Neill, p. 523.
68. Hebblethwaite (1984), pp. 100–2.
69. Tramontin, p. 139 and Holmes, p. 25.
70. Falconi, p. 100.
71. La CC, 70, 2 (1919), pp. 231–3.
72. Ibid., and 71, 3 (1920), p. 427.
73. Ibid., p. 428.
74. As quoted in Rouse and Neill (eds), p. 413.
75. Rouse and Neill (eds.) p. 416.
76. AAES, Stati della Chiesa, 1433, pp. 582–3, Restaurazione della Cristiana Unità: Corrispondenza.
77. Ibid.
78. Ibid.
79. Ibid.
80. AAES, Stati della Chiesa, 1433, pp. 582–3, memorandum of 6 September 1920 which expressed just such fears following the visit of the Anglican Bishop of Gibraltar to Smyrna.
81. Pawley, p. 262.
82. Ibid., p. 263.
83. Ibid., p. 265.