by Jacob Phillips, The Critic
Pope Benedict XV was voted into office on 3rd August 1914, less than a week after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The focus of his papacy was therefore the Great War that ravaged the continent for most of his seven year term. He called it “the suicide of civilised Europe”, declared the Holy See to be neutral in the conflict, and sought to mediate between the two sides to broker peace.
Just under a hundred years later Pope Francis was voted into office on 13th March 2013. His eleven year papacy did not feature conflict on anything like the scale or severity of the First World War. It did however feature that strange form of mostly nonviolent conflict we call the culture wars.
Indeed, he was fully cognisant of this fact. He spoke of how social crises were leading some to retreat into private worlds of likeminded factions. As early as 2013 he mentioned that people were embracing conflict “in such a way that they become its prisoners; they lose their bearings” and “project onto institutions their own confusion and dissatisfaction”. In his last encyclical he wrote of those who “bombarded by technology … often find themselves confused and torn apart”
Something which those unfamiliar with Catholicism often misunderstand, and of which those all too familiar with Catholicism often need reminding, is that the Catholic Church is not understood by Catholics to be a merely human institution. This means the Church is not like merely political or cultural organisations, and so cannot be as vulnerable to the back-and-forth between opposing sides that currently dominates society at large. This means the Church should be able to stand above the deep oppositional divisions currently dominating the world at large, and indeed adjudicate between them, on occasion. The spirit of Benedict XV should be reimagined in our era of social media, widespread division, populism, and social fragmentation.