Religion and violence

A new series of peace initiatives was undertaken in the course of 1917. On the Protestant side, Nathan Söderblom proposed, without success, a world peace conference. On the Catholic side, the Pope's encyclical of 1 August put forward a package of proposals for the establishment of a lasting peace . A minority of bishops approved it unconditionally, but it was largely ignored. It received harsh public criticism in France and Germany. The argument advanced by those Catholics opposed to the Pope's initiative was that the Pope was speaking not as a spiritual leader but as the ruler of a neutral state. The Orthodox and Jewish authorities remained silent. The Muslim authorities were divided by three contradictory appeals for jihad, while, in addition to the antagonism between the Sheikh-al-Islam and the Sharif of Mecca, there had been a mobilisation of Mesopotamian Shiites against the British army of India.

Three new elements changed the situation in at the end of 1917. The new Soviet Russia withdrew from the conflict, revealing all the secret agreements. This revelation was received with indignation by Faisal and Hussein, but did not lead them to disengage. To shift the majority germanophile tendency of Jews in the US, the British Foreign Secretary Balfour^[1] promised the establishment of a Jewish 'national homeland' in Palestine (2 November 1917), which was at once ruled out by Germany and Austria-Hungary. A few months earlier the United States had declared war on the Central powers, on condition that new international rules should be established, founded on the freedom of the seas and the fixing of frontiers on the basis of respect for 'nationalities', embodied in President Wilson^[2]'s 'Fourteen Points' (January 1918). the entry into the war of the United States on the side of France and Great Britain drastically changed the balance of forces in autumn 1918 and led to the decision by the German political authorities to accept an armistice (11 November) three days after the abdication of the Kaiser.

The religious authorities had participated in the mobilisation effort, and they shared the joy of victory or the suffering of defeat. Kriegstheologie ('theology of war'), according to the Austrian expression, between the hope of victory and the search for peace through 'the Emperor', 'the King' or 'right', was maintained to the end. On 29 October 1918, Cardinal Piffl once again pronounced these words to the soldiers: “Our wealth and our blood for our Emperor! Our wealth and our blood for our country!” Six months later, in front of a crowd assembled on the esplanade in Fourvière (Lyon), Catholics gave “three shouts for France of the Sacred Heart: Thanks! Pity! Credo!” Very quickly, however, the tone changed. The members of the Lambeth Conference^[3] made an 'Appeal to all Christian People' (1920), which recognised the responsibility of those who worshipped Christ in the divisions that beset humanity. Resolution 9 called on all Christian communities to unite around a 'quadrilateral of consensus': the authority of the Holy Scriptures, the statement of faith of the Apostles' or Nicene Creed, the sacraments of baptism and holy communion, and the acceptance of an authoritative ministry. In the same year the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople, following the principle of 'if doctrine divides, service reunites', suggested the formation of a Fraternal Association of Churches: correspondence, exchange of students, mutual assistance. The response of Benedict XV was short and evasive. There was none from the Protestants, torn between France and Germany over responsibility for the war.

The armistice and then the peace negotiations were marked by the determination of the victors to apportion blame and punishment. Governments were dominated by anti-clericalism (France, Belgium, Italy) or by anti-Catholicism (Great Britain, United States). As a consequence, there was no attempt to recognise any convergence between Wilson's 'Fourteen Points' and the Pope's letter of 1 August 1917, still less to grant the Pope's wish to join the future League of Nations. The League was set up on 28 April 1919 by a pact between the 27 states who participated in the Paris Conference which was put at the top the five peace treaties. Thus the ratification of the treaties went hand in hand with a commitment to the League of Nations, marking it as belonging to the victors.

Benedict described the peace as 'relative' rather than 'just and honourable', because it made no reference to Christian values. He was worried about the new map drawn up by the victors: The disappearance of Austria – Hungary was not compensated for by the restoration of Poland, which was more than 80% Catholic, and the acquisition of Transylvania by Romania, which increased the leverage of the Catholic minority. There was no unanimity amongst Protestants on the pact or the treaties. The centre of the League, of course, was not Rome but Geneva, the city of Calvin. However, from March 1920, the Senate rejected the peace settlement and membership of an international body. And while in Czechoslovakia a minority exalted in the memory of Jan Hus, persecuted by Rome in the fifteenth century, the German speaking Protestant authorities were much more concerned about the threat of revolution in Germany from November 1918.

The creation of the 'Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes', later Yugoslavia, benefited the Slav Orthodox majority in the south, but Moscow had lost its status as 'the Third Rome' since the Bolshevik revolution. Faced with the threat of the spread of revolution, half a million Pontiques^[4] were sacrificed, as was the idea of an Orthodox Greece as inheritor of a large section of the Byzantine empire, in favour of a secular Turkish Republic, whose own citizens were also victims of killings and displacement during the course of the war (1920-23) , serving as a buffer zone between Europe and Soviet Russia. As for the Arabs, with a Muslim majority, they were unable to prevent the establishment of British and French mandates in the Near East. Faisal, who agreed a conditional accord with the Zionist Haïm Weizmann^[5] to be negotiated at Paris, was abandoned by his own people and, without a united Arab state, ended up with only the throne of Iraq under British rule after having been expelled from Damascus by the French. His brother Abdullah^[6] was given the throne of Transjordan under similar conditions. Palestine, under the British mandate, was plagued by violent strife with the increasing settlement of Jews. Only one section of minority Christians, Shiites and Druze came out well, with the creation of Greater Lebanon under French domination, to the detriment of the previously dominant Sunnis. In any case, the Middle East appeared of secondary concern to the powers, at the moment when General Pilsudski^[7] was advancing with the Red Army to the gates of Warsaw (December 1919 to August 1920).