Benedict XV is the forgotten pope of the twentieth century - the Pope of the Lost Generation, the Pope of the War. The aristocratic Giacomo della Chiesa succeeded the saintly commoner Pius X on the Throne of Peter after the latter died on August 20, 1914 - mere weeks after the outbreak of World War I - and died himself in 1922, three years after Versailles. While his predecessor was the only twentieth century pope canonized before the dual canonizations of St John XXIII and St John Paul II in 2014, and his successor settled the half-century-long conflict between the Holy See and the Kingdom of Italy, Benedict is primarily notable for failing to stop what he himself called "the suicide of Christendom".
Fr Rope did not write a disinterested biography, but an aggressive justification of Benedict's actions during the War, attacking claims made both at the time and later that the Pope failed in his sacred duty, doing nothing while Europe destroyed itself. To this purpose, Rope catalogues Benedict's extensive efforts to negotiate peace and, failing that, to arrange for temporary truces, prisoner exchanges, and aid to civilian refugees. He is far less interested in his subject's life before becoming Pope, or in his actions which did not relate to the war, although he touches on them. His occasional allusions to Masonic plots are somewhat jarring to the less conspiratorially minded reader, and entirely unnecessary to explain events. Where the book shines is in its thorough defense of Benedict's wartime record, the criticisms of which are uncannily similar to those leveled against Pius XII. Fr Rope's greatest advantage is chronological - writing in the first years of the Second World War, he has little difficulty demonstrating how the realignment of Europe according to supposedly entirely rational, enlightened principles - in total disregard for the higher justice insisted upon by Benedict XV - led directly to moral disaster.
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