Benedict XV’s papacy lasted from 1914 until his death in 1922, taking place during the new horrors of modern war. The church strove to adapt to the world of poison gas, aerial bombardment and unrestricted submarine warfare. Nevertheless, Pope Benedict XV remains the “unknown pope,” in the words of his English-language biographer, the Cambridge historian John Pollard.
Why is Pope Benedict XV so relatively unknown? Besides his marginalization by leading politicians of his era, part of the answer must be that his world existed before the invention of radio and television that could reach global audiences. Additionally, Benedict’s reserved, unassuming demeanour would not seem to measure up to the outsized personalities of modern popes including Pius XI and Pius XII, shaped by their struggles with communism and fascism, and the two new canonized popes, John XXIII and John Paul II, who adapted the church to the new realities of globalized politics.
Giacomo della Chiesa was elected Pope Benedict XV in September 1914 as World War I was just beginning, and Catholic Europe was one of the many fracture zones. Heavily Catholic countries like France, Belgium and Italy fought their coreligionists in Austria-Hungary and Germany. (Catholics were a key minority in the German Empire, approximately 36 percent of the population in 1914.) Attuned to the realities of the political situation, Benedict would denounce the war as “useless slaughter” and the “suicide of civilized Europe.”
