“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Dear Reader,
Things being more or less equal, war is a test of systems. It is also a test of assumptions. Especially on the part of those who start the war. And the result of the conflict proves or disproves those assumptions.
The Great War and the Second World War begin and end a 30 year period of testing. In the end, the American system won. It was a fair test, Europe dominated the world in 1914, in 1945, the United States dominated the world. How this happened is what I will write about this Wednesday and next Wednesday before returning to my regular largely chronological look at the world wars.
Picture the world in 1914: Europeans controlled 70% of the world. With the exception of the French Third Republic and the Netherlands, the Europeans had formal, established, Christian sects as their official religions. Here is a list of the imperial powers in 1914, excluding the minor Scandinavian powers:
British Empire – Church of England (official state church)
French Empire – None (officially secular since 1905)
Russian Empire – Russian Orthodox Church (official state church)
German Empire – Roman Catholic Church and Evangelical Church of the Old Prussian Union (established at the subnational level)
Belgian Empire – Roman Catholic Church (official state church)
Portuguese Empire – Roman Catholic Church (official state church)
Italian Empire – Roman Catholic Church (official state church)
Dutch Empire – Dutch Reformed Church (formerly favored church until 1848; no official church afterward)
Spanish Empire – Roman Catholic Church (official state church)
Austria-Hungary – Roman Catholic Church (official in Austria; multi-confessional empire)
The only areas they did not rule, outside of the former European colonies in the Americas were: China, Japan, Siam/Thailand, Afghanistan, Persia/Iran, Ethiopia, Liberia, and the Najd in Arabia.
That’s it.
The Europeans could make the world what they wanted; collectively they controlled more resources than the USA would in 1945. And they made choices that destroyed themselves and the old order. Any American appealing to the pre-1914 European model over the American one is engaging in the laziest and shallowest of analysis. No one destroyed Europe but Europe. When the First World War broke out Pope Pius X was driven to lament and melancholy at the disaster. He died on August 20th 1914 after falling ill on the 15th, the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. His last words were reported as “Now I begin to think the end is approaching. The Almighty in His inexhaustible goodness wishes to spare me the horrors which Europe is undergoing.”
His successor was the sixty-year old Giacomo Paolo Giovanni Battista della Chiesa, who would now reign as Pope Benedict XV. He took his seat on the throne of St Peter on September 3, 1914, five weeks into the war that was old Europe’s suicide.
A papal encyclical is a pastoral letter written by the Pope to the entire Roman Catholic Church addressing topics related to doctrine, morals, or discipline. The word encyclical comes from the Greek enkyklios, meaning "circular". While these letters are typically addressed to the bishops of the Roman Catholic Church, some, have been addressed to "the entire Catholic World" and "all Men of Good Will". The formal title of an encyclical is taken from the first few words of the official text, usually in Latin.
Pope Benedict XV issued his first encyclical on All Saints Day, November 1, 1914, entitled Ad beatissimi Apostolorum, To the Most Blessed Apostles. He directly addressed the crisis of the Great War in his message to the Church.
After acknowledging the call of God on his life in light of his recent election to the papacy, he went to the heart of the crisis. It is a long quote, but worth the read for contextualizing what was already clear to the Pope in only the third month of the First World War:
But as soon as we were able from the height of Apostolic dignity to survey at a glance the course of human affairs, our eyes were met by the sad conditions of human society, and we could not but be filled with bitter sorrow. For what could prevent the soul of the common Father of all being most deeply distressed by the spectacle presented by Europe, nay, by the whole world, perhaps the saddest and most mournful spectacle of which there is any record. Certainly those days would seem to have come upon us of which Christ Our Lord foretold: "You shall hear of wars and rumors of wars - for nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom" (Matt. xxiv, 6, 7). On every side the dread phantom of war holds sway: there is scarce room for another thought in the minds of men. The combatants are the greatest and wealthiest nations of the earth; what wonder, then, if, well provided with the most awful weapons modern military science has devised, they strive to destroy one another with refinements of horror. There is no limit to the measure of ruin and of slaughter; day by day the earth is drenched with newly-shed blood, and is covered with the bodies of the wounded and of the slain. Who would imagine as we see them thus filled with hatred of one another, that they are all of one common stock, all of the same nature, all members of the same human society? Who would recognize brothers, whose Father is in Heaven? Yet, while with numberless troops the furious battle is engaged, the sad cohorts of war, sorrow and distress swoop down upon every city and every home; day by day the mighty number of widows and orphans increases, and with the interruption of communications, trade is at a standstill; agriculture is abandoned; the arts are reduced to inactivity; the wealthy are in difficulties; the poor are reduced to abject misery; all are in distress.
By November, there were already one million casualties—one million in less than one hundred days.
He then went on to identify the problem of 'Christian Europe.' De facto, the rulers were functionally not ruling as Christian princes or politicians. A moral and spiritual decay gripped the European heart. He argued that when governments abandoned Christian teachings, which once upheld peace and order, the foundations of civilization would have to crumble because civilization was upheld by Christian principles. The war was the delayed consequence of the changed world perspective of the European elite. The consequences were:
“Thus we see the absence from the relation of men of mutual love with their fellow men; the authority of rulers is held in contempt; injustice reigns in relations between the classes of society; the striving for transient and perishable things is so keen, that men have lost sight of the other and more worthy goods they have to obtain.”
So, racism, class divisions, the mocking of lawful and ordained authority, and greedy materialism—all of which, by becoming dominant among the elites, led to the madness of the war.
Post-colonial scholars are perhaps too proud of themselves for linking the Great War to racism, the greedy desire for imperial resources, and chauvinism. The Pope saw all this clearly in 1914 without needing to develop a new methodology. The leader of perhaps the most conservative Western institution continued with the following, to which I have added bold for emphasis:
Never perhaps was there more talking about the brotherhood of men than there is today; in fact, men do not hesitate to proclaim that striving after brotherhood is one of the greatest gifts of modern civilization, ignoring the teaching of the Gospel, and setting aside the work of Christ and of His Church. But in reality never was there less brotherly activity amongst men than at the present moment. Race hatred has reached its climax; peoples are more divided by jealousies than by frontiers; within one and the same nation, within the same city there rages the burning envy of class against class; and amongst individuals it is self-love which is the supreme law over-ruling everything.
By authority, the Pope meant the authority of God in light of the Christian Bible’s Book of Romans, which in its thirteenth chapter declares that all authority comes from God and that civil authority has a duty to protect the innocent and terrify the wicked. This injunction is the identification card of good government. When governments become oriented toward their own vanity and turn away from this, they depart from what the Pope saw as a holy mission to provide order and justice. In 1953, during the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and other realms, the Archbishop of Canterbury laid the Sword of State on the altar and said:
Hear our prayers, O LORD, we beseech thee,
and so direct and support thy servant
Queen ELIZABETH,
that she may not bear the Sword in vain;
but may use it as the minister of God
for the terror and punishment of evildoers,
and for the protection and encouragement of those that do well,
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Again, this was understood as the foundation of good government. In 2023, conservative commentators remarked that the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Portal Welby, revealed his—and the British establishment’s, including the Conservative Party’s—lack of understanding of what government is for when he removed this prayer from the coronation of King Charles III.
This ideal of the state tended toward compassionate justice because it recognized that the lack of state-imposed justice and restraint benefited the elite and well-connected at the expense of everyone else. Eventually, unchecked injustice would lead to social upheaval and political violence.
The Almighty in His inexhaustible goodness wishes to spare me the horrors which Europe is undergoing. Pope Pius X, August 1914
Which brings us back to the context of 1914–1945. Europe had the power, wealth, material, and heritage to create a paradise for itself, and it stepped into the hell of war. Yet, even as it happened, European leaders looked across the sea to the United States with both suspicion and envy. And they drew the wrong conclusions from American history and misunderstood what made America great. Why did democracy and religion coexist so well in America despite the lack of an established sect? How did the United States avoid a Red Revolution or a French Revolution? These questions matter because in 1914, the great and mighty governments of Europe—all of them except for Russia having some form of representative government—went open-eyed into self-destruction. Given the advantages that Europe threw away, it is fair to say that America deserved to win the twentieth century. Governments and nations have choices, and choices have consequences. America made the right choices, and Europe did not. I’ll detail the specifics of what set European and American choices apart next week when I look at European envy of America before the Second World War.
Brotherly love is not calculated to get rid of the differences of conditions and therefore of classes - a result which is just as impossible as that in the living body all the members should have the same functions and dignity - but it will bring it to pass that those who occupy higher positions will in some way bring themselves down to those in a lower position, and treat them not only justly, for it is only right that they should, but kindly and in a friendly and patient spirit, and the poor on their side will rejoice in their prosperity and rely confidently on their help - even as the younger son of a family relies on the help and protection of his elder brother. — Pope Benedict XV AD BEATISSIMI APOSTOLORUM