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Review of Anita Rasi May, Patriot Priests: French Catholic Clergy and National Identity in World War I

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 3 (September 2019)

Review of Anita Rasi May, Patriot Priests: French Catholic Clergy and National Identity in World War I (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018), X + 162 Pp., ISBN: 9780806159089.

By Heath Spencer, Seattle University

More than 33,000 French priests and members of religious orders served in the First World War. Although many of them were government-appointed or volunteer chaplains, the majority were involved in other ways—as stretcher-bearers, nurses, and combatants. Anita Rasi May draws on the memoirs, letters and biographies of thirty-three of these individuals in order to shed light on their subjective experiences. She begins with a survey of anticlerical policies during the prewar Third Republic, a “culture war” situation in which the French Catholic Church saw its status and privileges significantly curtailed. She follows up with analysis of the responses of French priests to the outbreak of war, the variety of ways in which they participated, and their perceptions of the war’s meaning for France and the church. As she assesses the consequences of the war on church-state relations, she concludes that “in the postwar period there emerged a new relationship between the priests and the people due in large part to the memory of the priests’ wartime service and to their key role in memorializing their many fallen comrades. This newly won respect provided the atmosphere in which both the government and church leaders worked out compromises in their ongoing relationship” (10).

The anticlerical policies of the prewar era provide an important backdrop for understanding the mentalities and motivations of French priests, bishops and members of religious orders during the war itself. From the 1870s forward, French political leaders feared that Catholic clergy and institutions “did not form patriots but rather encouraged loyalty to monarchical government and to an international organization, the Catholic Church, based in Rome” (16). They responded by dissolving the Jesuits and other religious orders, abolishing the military chaplaincy, and ending priests’ exemption from military service. The Catholic Church’s dubious role in the Dreyfus Affair provided the pretext for further anticlerical measures, including the abolition of church schools and the formal separation of church and state. The government’s open hostility to the Catholic Church was accompanied by a long, steady decline in religious observance, especially among people of the working class, and among men of all classes.

In light of such troubling developments, French clergy saw the Great War as an opportunity to demonstrate their patriotism and prove their worth to national community. Like their counterparts in other belligerent countries, French priests believed their nation’s cause was just, but an equally powerful motivation for supporting the war was the prospect of restoring the Catholic Church to its former prominence and reversing the secularization of state and society. May cites the example of a Franciscan seminarian who believed that the war would lead to a rebirth of “the France of years past, that is to say, the true Christian France” (50). As ordinary people flocked to religious ceremonies and cheered for priests who volunteered for war service, many clergy believed they were witnessing a revitalization of religious life and an end to anticlerical hostility. These hopes and expectations help explain why so many priests volunteered for combat and non-combat roles, why French bishops gave their assent, and why so few French clergy opposed the war and the phenomenon of the soldier priest.

May’s research gives us a glimpse into the inner world of those clergy who spent time at the front. For example, Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who went on to become one of the twentieth century’s most prominent philosophers, was a stretcher-bearer with the 8^th Regiment of Moroccan Riflemen. He saw the war as a “baptism into reality” (52) and hoped his position would give him influence among the men with whom he served. A Franciscan chaplain named Édouard de Massat described the war itself as “a missionary whose voice is more eloquent than our own” and expressed the hope that France would emerge from the struggle “with a new soul” (56). As time went on, priests grew more realistic about the prospects of mass conversion and religious renewal, and their efforts at evangelizing gave way to an emphasis on pastoral care and service to their comrades in arms. This was as true of soldier priests and medical personnel as it was of chaplains.

May notes that most priests adjusted well to military life and found it easy to combine patriotic fervor and military service with their Catholic faith. This was also true of those who experienced combat. May provides numerous examples of priests who were promoted to officer status, led assaults on enemy positions, and participated actively and sometimes enthusiastically in killing. Although none of May’s thirty-three priests were pacifists, all were aware of the horrors of war (especially the damage it inflicted on their own countrymen) and occasionally struggled over the ethics of killing. Although May asserts that “in these memoirs, journals, autobiographies and biographies…there is no love of war for itself” (78), she also quotes a chaplain named Jean Lagardère who said of the front: “I am happy here: the friendship of the men, the rattling of arms, the noise of the cannon, the whistling of bullets, the view of the trenches, their infected mud delights me, thrills me, makes me quiver. I am only at home there, I only breathe there, I only do good there. I only feel myself a man there” (78). They knew the horrors of war, and some loved it anyway.

Priests’ reactions to the war were complicated and contradictory on a variety of levels. For example, they expressed contempt for men who refused to fight or mutilated themselves to avoid military service, yet some of them intervened on behalf of soldiers condemned to death for breaches of discipline. Some regretted killing the enemy, or regretted enjoying it, but few gave much thought to the humanity of the enemy. Most preferred to focus on the French soldier’s self-sacrifice rather than his role as a perpetrator of violence, and they made frequent comparisons with Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. A war sermon by chaplain Louis Lenoir was one of the more eloquent and revealing expressions of this blend of faith, war, and nationalist euphoria: “Like that of Christ, this ‘beautiful blood of France’ was today, as it has always been in history, ‘liberating blood’…spread across Europe and to the extremities of the earth to defend nations against injustice and support religious and social freedom…search all the corners of the world where violated liberty has called for help, everywhere you will find traces of French blood” (85).

Whether they were chaplains, medical personnel, or soldiers, French priests took their apostolic work seriously. They administered the sacraments, counseled individual soldiers, mailed or hand delivered letters, procured books and personal items, established social spaces where soldiers could relax, visited soldiers’ families when on leave, and conveyed gifts from those families to soldiers with whom they served at the front. They heard confessions, granted absolution, and gave communion before attacks, and in the aftermath, they performed last rites for the dying, presided over burials and masses for the dead, and helped with the mapping of cemeteries. Not surprisingly, the pastoral ministry of priests at the front seems to have been the role that was most widely appreciated and accepted, even among persons who had left the church and had no interest in returning.

In terms of long-term impact, the priests’ expectations only partly coincided with reality. When the war began, many of them believed they would have the opportunity “to evangelize men who were not the usual churchgoers in early twentieth-century France” (64). They also hoped to demonstrate that they were just as manly and patriotic—and as much a part of the national community—as other French men. Although the mass conversions did not occur, priests did develop “bonds of brotherhood” with many soldiers, “based more on mutual respect than on shared faith. They also found in themselves a capacity for violence and for being swept up into the exaltation of battle, which strengthened their feelings of brotherhood and empathy for their fellows” (109). As an institution, the French Catholic Church enjoyed a slight improvement of its status in the postwar era. The state and the education system remained secularized, but members of religious orders who had returned from exile to fight for France were allowed to remain there when the war had ended. The French government also restored diplomatic relations with the Vatican, and though anticlerical laws remained on the books, they were not always rigorously enforced. In fact, when the government of Édouard Herriot attempted to do so in 1926, veteran priests played an important role in the protests that forced the state to back down. May credits these successes to the fact that priests enjoyed a new level of respect and status due to their wartime service.

May’s book offers a fascinating glimpse into the fears, frustrations and hopes of Catholic clergy during the First World War. The priests themselves are a stark example of the “self-mobilization” that was so prevalent in the “war cultures” of Europe during this period.[1] At the same time, the book suffers from a number of shortcomings in terms of framing as well as the selection and interpretation of sources.

First, it relies too much on priests’ own perceptions of their impact without considering other kinds of data. For example, it would be helpful to see information on baptisms, confirmations and other indicators of religious observance before, during and after the war. To what extent did the war service of priests and the rapprochement between church and state disrupt or mitigate the long, steady decline in public, corporate worship? May also refers to wartime rumors and disinformation in “anticlerical newspapers and speeches” (116) but does not comment on the intensity of anticlerical discourses at different points in time. Tracking changes and continuities in the anticlerical press would be another way of assessing whether the priests’ war service had an impact on popular opinion (i.e. whether they achieved the respect and recognition they longed for or merely imagined it).

A second shortcoming is the fact that May engages the question of clerical violence on only the most superficial level. She notes that soldier priests killed and sometimes expressed regret for killing (or for enjoying it) and follows up with the claim that these experiences made it easier for priests to identify with and minister to other men who had been in combat. May does not explore the long tradition of Catholic theological reflection on violence, nor does she acknowledge that there were many other possible areas of shared experience (visiting brothels, for example) from which priests were expected to abstain. What made military violence different?

May’s temporal framework is also problematic. Her story ends in 1926 at what appears to be a comeback moment for Catholics in France’s culture wars—a happy ending of sorts. Extending the study to 1940 or 1945 would complicate things, as May would have to grapple with those segments of the Catholic Church that supported far right movements, cast their lot with the Vichy regime and celebrated the demise of the Third Republic.

Finally, May’s study adopts an exclusively national perspective with only the briefest references to other European states and the wider world. Comparative analysis across European cultural and religious landscapes would make it more difficult to affirm the validity of bargains in which clergy supported questionable regimes and policies in exchange for acceptance and influence. The response of many German clergy to their country’s “national renewal” in 1933 should serve as a cautionary tale. Likewise, May fails to incorporate insights from a large body of recent research on the global dimensions of the war. Though she notes the existence of colonial troops, she offers no meaningful discussion of their religious and cultural identities or their wartime experiences. Several of May’s priests (including Teilhard and Lenoir) embraced their role as missionaries and affirmed France’s “civilizing mission” throughout the world, but May does not indicate the context in which those efforts and assumptions played out. For example, the majority of France’s colonial soldiers were forcibly recruited through processes that did great violence to them, their families, and their communities. After arriving in Europe, they were deployed as shock troops in an effort to lower the death toll among white French soldiers.[2] We cannot understand the ideas and actions of priests like Teilhard and Lenoir apart from these realities. By neglecting them, May’s book remains confined to the same limited horizons as the priests’ own accounts of the war and its meaning.

[1] See John Horne, “Public Opinion and Politics,” in A Companion to World War I, ed. John Horne (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2004), 280-281.

[2] See Joe Lunn, Memoirs of the Maelstrom: A Senegalese Oral History of the First World War (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1999).

Review of Michael W. Brierley and Georgina A. Byrne, Life after Tragedy: Essays on Faith and the First World War evoked by Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 1 (March 2018)

Review of Michael W. Brierley and Georgina A. Byrne, Life after Tragedy: Essays on Faith and the First World War evoked by Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2017). Pp. xxiv + 254. ISBN 978-1-5326-0226-9.

By Andrew Chandler, University of Chichester

The many centenary anniversaries of the First World War which have accumulated in Britain since 2014 have produced many significant contributions in many different forms. They have also given historians of religion an audience for their growing explorations of the diverse religious dimensions of the conflict. One of these dimensions has been the experiences of chaplains to the armed forces—a field which that fine historian, Michael Snape, has made his own. It is in this context that the striking figure of Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy emerges.

Studdert Kennedy, or ‘Woodbine Willie’, as he was affectionately known by soldiers, has long been the most well-known of the British wartime chaplains. He has attracted the attention of scholars of various kinds for his poetry (The Unutterable Beauty, published in 1927, remains much admired in some quarters), his trenchant criticisms of the status quo, his uncompromising socialism, his pungent scepticism of authority (one of his books was simply called Lies), and his determination that the ghastliness of war must surely and eventually yield a better world. But he was also the embodiment of courage and unselfconscious sacrifice (he won the Military Cross) and his early death, exhausted, at the age of 45, presented something of the quality of a martyrdom—not so much to the powers of the age but perhaps to the whole age in which he lived. Westminster Abbey notoriously turned down the idea of hosting his funeral. One suspects that Studdert Kennedy would have been delighted by the compliment.

This collection of anniversary essays is very much the work of two members of the clergy of the Church of England who have sought to claim for their cathedral something of a responsibility for public scholarship and critical reflection. This is admirable, and these days rare. Once I would have thought that an English cathedral could make a very good home to scholarship and that English priests at large might know how to value the reality of historical experience. I have long since lost that faith and find that even a book like this cannot quite revive it. Nonetheless, what we have here is solid fare and it expresses the commitments of ten priests, while the two laymen turn out to be lay canons of cathedrals. The effect is collegial: for the most part they share a common geography as well as denomination and one senses that they are happy to be found in company together.

Michael Snape inaugurates the volume with an efficient ‘reconsideration’ of British religion and the First World War, while Michael Brierley offers a brisk sketch of the life of Studdert Kennedy. John Inge presents a more personal and wide-ranging reflection on the war as it affected the sensibilities of ‘place’ and ‘home’, finding Studdert Kennedy at home only in the Christ of the Gospels and the worship of the Church. Peter Atkinson confronts Studdert Kennedy the poet and holds to account the imperious responses of later English literary critics, particularly I.A. Richards and Roy Fuller, before proceeding to a discussion of the poetry of Geoffrey Dearmer. Michael Brierley returns with a discussion of Studdert Kennedy and the ‘new vision’ of a suffering God—a vision which would resonate so profoundly, and be developed, in the later theology of the European twentieth century. Georgina Byrne examines different forms of preaching (‘Prophesy or Propaganda?’), locating Studdert Kennedy alongside the ‘intensely patriotic’ Bishop of London, Winnington Ingram (who has almost become a subject, or at least a controversy, in his own right) and the eloquent individualist and pacifist (of a kind), Maude Royden. A discursive Mark Dorsett places Studdert Kennedy in the company of the like-minded Edward Lee Hicks (a notable bishop of Lincoln and a leading Christian Socialist) and the influential thinker R.H. Tawney, while looking to further horizons. David Bryer provides a useful survey of the war and its impact on the development of humanitarianism while Alvyn Pettersen discusses images of glory in war memorials, examining those at Worcester itself and at Magdeburg Cathedral (by Ernst Barlach) before jumping, attractively but perhaps surprisingly, into a reflection on the life of the fourth-century monk, Antony of Egypt. By way of conclusion Mark Chapman is very much at home in a discussion of Anglican theology, not least in its stray connections with German theologians, during and immediately after the war. Finally, the two editors retrieve and reconfigure strands in a concluding reflection on ’integration, balance and fullness’. An Afterword by the bishop of the Evangelical Church in Central Germany, Ilse Junkermann, is only momentarily a response to the life of Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy and suggests a diocesan link at work. In no small measure is the integrity of the volume affirmed by a very good, robust bibliography.

In sum, there is enough here to satisfy the questions and perspectives of the conventionally-minded historian. Equally, theologians of society, war, literature ethics and aesthetics, will find much to intrigue them. Michael Brierley and Georgina Byrne have done particularly well to bring the whole feast before us and more than the figure of the marvellous Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy is honoured by it all.

Conference Report: Faith and the First World War, University of Glasgow, 21-23 July 2016

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 3 (September 2016)

Conference Report: Faith and the First World War, University of Glasgow, 21-23 July 2016

By Geoff Jackson, Ambrose University

In late July, I had the opportunity to participate in the “Faith and the First World War” conference at the University of Glasgow. The conference explored the wide diversity and significance of religious faith for those who experienced the First World War, addressing themes such as faith in the armed forces and on the home front, religion, war resistance and the peace crusade, as well as the role of religion in remembrance.

The keynote address was delivered by Michael Snape of Durham University, a leading Anglican historian, who delivered the fascinating paper “From Flanders to Helmand: Chaplaincy, Faith and Religious Change in the British Army, 1914-2014.” While commenting on the obvious differences between the ways wars have been fought from the First World War to present-day conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, he argued that the role of chaplains was largely unchanged. He demonstrated convincingly that the relationship of faith to soldiers was still as important today as it was 100 years ago. This idea of faith and soldiers was the dominant theme of the conference, and ran throughout most of the presentations.

The papers covered a broad range of themes ranging from discussion of the use of the Old Testament in mobilizing Germans for the war effort to comparative studies on how the Scottish and Irish Reformed churches participated in the First World War. Gerhard Besier of the Technical University of Dresden presented on “Harmonizing Conflicting Demands and Emotions: Christian Believers during WWI.” Cyril Pearce of the University of Leeds examined Christian war resisters and their protests during the war. Pearce has mined war documents, letters, images, tribunal records and diaries to create a list of over 16,000 First World War conscientious objectors. He has also begun mapping these names, where possible, to identify communities were conscientious objection was more prevalent.

Another excellent paper was British archivist James W. Fleming’s “‘All war being contrary to the spirit and teaching of Jesus Christ I could take no part in its prosecution’: Faith and Conscientious Objection in the First World War.” Fleming analyzed conscientious objector applications–both those that were accepted and those that were denied. This could be a valuable source for those interested in studying the topic.

My (Geoff Jackson’s) paper examined the role of Canadian chaplains as part of the larger British Expeditionary Force. It examined the role of Church of England chaplains through the optics of a transnational study to demonstrate that Anglican chaplains, as part of the same religious organization, played similar but distinct roles in various national contexts. The paper argued that, depending on which national army the chaplains were working under, they had different objectives, motivations, outside influences and pressures, all of which affected the care they were able to administer to the soldiers. It generated some fascinating debate, and I also received a book from a chaplain who saw service in Afghanistan and Iraq–a really special treat.

The third day of the conference examined the role of women peace crusaders. The opening paper, “‘If Christ could be militant so could I’: Helen Crawfurd and the Women’s Peace Crusade, 1916-1918,” was delivered by activist and historian Lesley Orr, previously of the Universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh. The balance of the day was spent on a walk to commemorate the first Women’s Peace Crusade. In its original form, the first Women’s Peace Crusade marched from George Square to Glasgow Green, drawing crowds of thousands. This Crusade grew into a mass international women’s peace movement. Since early 2016 a group of amateur women historians have been discovering some of the remarkable women involved. 100 years later to the day a similar parade was held (albeit, with far fewer participants). It was a poignant walk on a fortunately sunny day.

The people and campus of the University of Glasgow were fantastic. I had the chance to explore the university and its chapel which was built in remembrance of the students who fought and died during the First World War. This conference reinvigorated my desire to research Canadian chaplains and their roles in the First World War.

Conference Announcement: Faith and the First World War, University of Glasgow, 21-22 July 2016

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 2 (June 2016)

Conference Announcement: Faith and the First World War, University of Glasgow, 21-22 July 2016

Faith-WWI The extent and importance of religious faith in the First World War is undoubtedly one of the great rediscoveries of the centenary years. Among the belligerent empires and nations, religion proved to be a vital sustaining and motivating force, with the Ottoman war effort cloaked as a jihad, the United States entering the war on Good Friday 1917, and even professedly secular societies such as France experiencing a degree of religious revival. At the same time religious convictions also provided some of the most powerful critiques of the war, contributing to tireless peace-making efforts by Pope Benedict XV and to the stand of thousands of conscientious objectors in Great Britain and the United States. Faith also inspired many of the women who were active in war resistance and initiatives for peace, including Quakers, feminists and Christian socialists who were involved in the Hague Peace Congress of 1915, the resulting Women’s International League, and also grassroots action such as the Women’s Peace Crusade, which was launched in Glasgow in the summer of 1916.

This conference seeks to explore the huge diversity and significance of religious faith for those who experienced the First World War, addressing themes such as faith in the armed forces and on the home front, religion, war resistance and the peace crusade, and the role of religion in remembrance.

Key-note speakers will include Professor S. J. Brown (University of Edinburgh), Dr Lesley Orr (University of Edinburgh), and Professor Michael Snape (University of Durham).

There will also be a program of events to mark the centenary of the Women’s Peace Crusade, which will take place on 23 July 2016 at the Glasgow Women’s Library.

To register for the conference, please contact Dr Charlotte Methuen (charlotte.methuen@glasgow.ac.uk) or visit (https://www.eventbrite.com/e/faith-and-the-first-world-war-tickets-24680348587). Cost to participants is £25.00 per day to include coffees, teas and lunch. Please pay by cheque (made out to “The University of Glasgow”) or by cash on the day. A list of local and university accommodation is also available.

Review of Robert Beaken, The Church of England and the Home Front 1914-1918

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 1 (March 2016)

Review of Robert Beaken, The Church of England and the Home Front 1914-1918 (Rochester, NY: Boydell and Brewer, 2015). Pp. 272. ISBN: 9781783270514.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Colchester, fifty two miles north-east of London, has been a garrison town since the days of the Romans. During the First World War its military establishment was vastly expanded, including four major army hospitals where the casualties from the battlefields in France were treated. The impact of the war was immediate and very visible. Colchester’s Church of England parishes were quickly and significantly involved, as is described in Beaken’s insightful and well researched account of these critical years.

Beaken-Church Colchester’s social elite, which was well represented in the Church of England parishes, was conservative, nationalist and hierarchical. Its members supported the British government’s decision to go to war in August 1914 for moral as well as political reasons. They joined in the widespread campaign urging young men to join the armed forces, until conscription was introduced in 1916, rendering such appeals superfluous. Thereafter the leading men set an example by supporting campaigns for contributions to the War Savings Bonds, while the church ladies were very active in ministering to the troops training in Colchester and to the wounded. Church people were assiduous in providing hospitality to the troops, and at least thirty five social clubs were established where recreational facilities and food were supplied, often at little cost. In part such provision was seen as a Christian virtue, but, as Beaken notes, in part it was inspired by the desire to keep the soldiers out of public houses, and so to keep prostitution and its attendant problems at bay.

The clergy’s position was more problematic. At first many of the younger clergy had felt drawn to join their parishioners by volunteering to serve in the ranks, which they believed would be a means of getting to know their fellow men better. But the bishops soon asserted that such notions were incompatible with their ordination vows. Instead they were to remain in their parishes where their services, because of the shortage of army chaplains and the extra requirements caused by the war, would be all the more demanding. In fact, in Colchester, both clergy and laity soon recognized the need for extra pastoral witness to the many thousands of young men passing through the garrison on their way to the western front, or to those returned to Colchester for treatment in the hospitals. They were also called to officiate at the funerals of those who died from their wounds, and to comfort their surviving families. After the initial euphoria of the early months was replaced by the grim horror of the devastating and depressing stalemate of the Flanders trench-warfare, the clergy’s often self-imposed role in support of the war effort became more dubious, and even counter-productive. Since it was they who often had to bring the dreaded news to the families of men killed in action, their pastoral skills were increasingly honed to the presence of disaster and death.

In the aftermath of the war, particularly in the 1930s, there was a widespread revulsion against all those, including a few prominent clergymen, who had so eagerly preached militant sermons in favour of the war effort. And inevitably such skepticism and resentment was turned against the religion these clergymen were upholding. The contradiction between the slaughter of so many of “the flower of the nation’s youth”, and the message of love and peace as contained in the Christian gospels was too glaring to be easily overcome. Understandably, Beaken does not try to answer the question posed by almost everyone at some point during the war: “Why does the Christian God allow such a devastating catastrophe to take place?” Instead he takes issue with some of the post-war writers, particularly those who misrepresented what actually happened and instead promoted their own interpretations for anti-war or pacifist reasons. For example, he dismisses the view that the ordinary workingman, who had volunteered for army service, had been seduced by bloodthirsty clergymen and subsequently was misled by glory-seeking and incompetent army leaders. So too the charge that the Church of England chaplains were too cowardly to go up to the front line needs to be refuted by the fact that such postings were forbidden by the military leaders. It is certainly true, as Beaken admits, that, despite the almost universal support of the war effort at the time, in later years many people came to feel that the senseless and degrading conflict in the Flanders mud had made the proclamation of the Christian gospel irrelevant. But the evidence here produced for the war-time conditions in Colchester would seem to prove the opposite. Church attendance remained almost the same throughout the war years, as did the number of confirmations. The overwhelming support given to the erection of war memorials, and the sincere participation at Armistice or Remembrance Day services for the remainder of the century and beyond, would seem to disprove the contention that the Church of England had a ‘bad’ First World War. Beaken disputes the myth that things were never the same after 1918. He points to the fact that in the vast majority of parishes the Church’s witness with its emphasis on Mattins on Sunday morning remained unchanged for a further fifty years. But he agrees that, in Colchester, as elsewhere, when the fabric if the city’s close-knit, inter-dependent society came apart, so the Church of England came to occupy a peripheral position. But this does not contradict Beaken’s central argument that the Church of England fared significantly better during the First World War than has been understood or acknowledged for much of the past century.

Review of Patrick J. Houlihan, Catholicism and the Great War: Religion and Everyday Life in Germany and Austria-Hungary, 1914-1922

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 3 (September 2015)

Review of Patrick J. Houlihan, Catholicism and the Great War: Religion and Everyday Life in Germany and Austria-Hungary, 1914-1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Xiii + 287 Pp. ISBN: 978-1-107-03514-0.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Catholicism and the Great War is a transnational comparative history of everyday Catholicism. In it Patrick J. Houlihan sets out to revise the story of Roman Catholic theology and lived religion during the First World War era in both Germany (where Catholics were a minority) and Austria-Hungary (where they comprised a majority). His subjects include church leaders, military chaplains, front soldiers, women and children at home, and the papacy. And his scope is not only the war but also its immediate aftermath, which allows him to tackle the additional themes of memory and commemoration. This is an ambitious book.

Houlihan-Catholicism Houlihan’s argument is that conventional interpretations of religion in the First World War, which emphasize the secularizing effect of a shattering war experience as expressed in the voices of cultural modernists, do not capture the experiences of German and Austro-Hungarian Catholics. Rather, he asserts that Catholics adjusted to industrial warfare because their transnational faith and its practices helped them to cope relatively successfully with the upheaval and brutality of war—more successfully than Protestants, whose faith (in the case of Germany) was more closely tied to the defeated state.

The book begins with a dense introduction, demonstrating Houlihan’s remarkable historiographical knowledge. Here and throughout the book, the author interacts substantively with a wide array of scholarly literature on religion and war, the First World War, nineteenth- and twentieth-century European Catholicism, military chaplaincy, religion and nationalism, women’s experiences of war, and numerous other topics. It is indeed the strength of his work.

Methodologically, Houlihan eschews quantitative or institutional history, embracing a transnational approach to his subject, which fits well with the internationalism of Roman Catholicism and enables him to avoid the trap of viewing Christian religion only in terms of its instrumental service to national movements and state interests. He also pursues a comparative methodology, highlighting differences between the experiences of German and Austro-Hungarian Catholics, though often distinctions are blurred as examples are drawn freely from both regions. Still, it is worth noting that Houlihan finds Austro-Hungarian Catholicism to have been a vital component in maintaining imperial loyalty and social cohesion, problematizing commonly-held assumptions about the inevitable demise of the Habsburg Empire. Finally, Houlihan also attempts to incorporate elements of the history of everyday life of Central European Catholics, and to blur boundaries between battlefront and homefront, creating what he calls a “family” history of Catholicism in the First World War (16).

All of these streams of interpretation are worked out in a series of chapters on Catholicism before the war, Catholic theology during the First World War, the role of Catholic military chaplains, the experiences of Catholic soldiers, the circumstances of Catholic women and children at home, the influence of the papacy, and memory and mourning among Catholics after 1918.

Leading up to the war, Catholics in Austria-Hungary were overwhelmingly rural, living in traditional local communities of belief. At the same time, however, new imagined communities were emerging in Central Europe, thanks to the various national movements which were often connected to Catholicism. German Catholics, on the other hand, were influenced most powerfully by the legacy of the Kulturkampf, which drove Catholics into a defensive posture, as demonstrated by Catholic political and labour movements. But for most Catholics in Central Europe, the outbreak of war in 1914 was seen mainly as yet another trial to be endured, and as a threat to the coming harvest.

Once the war had begun, German and Austrian bishops were prominent public advocates of just-war theology. For German Catholic leaders, war was a patriotic test of faith. For Austro-Hungarian bishops, it was a call to defend Habsburg dynastic honour and therefore the divine order as they understood it. Military chaplains played a significant role in mediating this theology to ordinary participants, not least by praying for divine blessings on military weapons. As the war dragged on, though, public theology began to emphasize the war as a punishment for aspects of modernity that had drawn Europeans away from God and the Church. And after defeat in 1918, Catholics in former Habsburg lands found themselves reimagining themselves at the dawn of a new day of freedom and opportunity—at least those from minority groups formed into new nation states, such as Czechs, Slovaks, Croats, Poles, and Slovenes. While the “new theologies” of Max Scheler, Romano Guardini, and Karl Adam would bear fruit only later in the 1960s, other “everyday theologies” were also emerging: positively, the rise of a feminine form of Catholicism; negatively, an upsurge of Catholic antisemitism which would later help to pave the way for Hitler and the Holocaust.

Military chaplains—of which there were 1441 in the Prussian Army and 3077 among the Habsburg forces—provided pastoral care among Catholic troops. This they did more effectively in Austria-Hungary than in Germany, according to Houlihan, who uses a case study of Tyrolean Catholics to support this point. Still, all chaplains were overwhelmed by the magnitude of industrial warfare. Houlihan notes that Catholic chaplains enjoyed better reputations than their Protestant counterparts, since they tended to serve closer to the front lines. In one of the best sections in the book, Houlihan explains how chaplains used the three sacraments of communion, confession, and extreme unction to minister to their troops. On the Western Front especially, the cramped quarters of static trench lines made holding a full Mass a rare event. In the end, Houlihan argues that 1916 was a watershed year. Triumphalist “God-with-us” pronouncements gave way increasingly to private doubts about God’s support in war and public reassurances of Christian hope and perseverance in times of suffering.

Among front line soldiers, Houlihan argues that Catholic religion served them better than has often been assumed, in light of the prominent modernist literature of authors like Jaroslav Hašek, Robert Graves or Erich Maria Remarque. Rather, Catholicism was surprisingly resilient in modern conflict, as ordinary soldiers coped with their circumstances by means of a mix of transnational Church institutions, sacramental practices, correspondence with home, superstition (including amulets, talismans, and letters of protection), and popular piety focused on saintly and Marian intercession.

On “the unquiet homefront,” Catholic women and children both suffered and benefitted from the war. Wartime disrupted traditional gender roles. Though public roles for women included war relief, nursing, and industry increased markedly, Houlihan argues that Catholic women in rural Central Europe tended to embrace more conservative, traditional roles. Just as the Virgin Mary was a powerful symbol for frontline soldiers, so too was Mary was a powerful symbol for Catholic women, either in her virginity or her motherhood. Above all, the home front was a nostalgic ideal of piety and peace. Family networks provided comfort—both for soldiers at the front and their wives and family members left at home. And although the First World War opened up new public opportunities for women, Houlihan finds that most rural Catholic women remained focused on local and domestic concerns and traditional religious practices.

Stepping back from the history of everyday religion, Houlihan argues that the Holy See remained fairly impartial during the early years of the war, “nearly bankrupting itself through its devotion to its caritas network of care, especially for POWs, displaced persons, and children” (188). Pope Benedict XV forecast a bloody, brutal war, but argued that the bonds of common humanity and the institutions of the Roman Catholic Church could serve as a force for peace and unity. To that end, his Papal Peace Note of August 1917 called upon the belligerents to embrace peace and civilization. Benedict also oversaw a major revision of Canon Law (1917) designed to strengthen papal power and reinvigorate the Church. Lastly—and here Houlihan returns to his ordinary Catholics—Benedict was important as a symbol. Indeed, many ordinary Catholics wrote to him, hoping he could personally intervene on their behalf or bring peace and reconciliation to a war-torn world.

In his final chapter, Houlihan carries his examination of German and Austro-Hungarian Catholicism into the postwar era, arguing that traditional religious imagery helped Europeans make sense of the war. Themes of collective sacrifice, deference to authority, and universal suffering, grief, and consolation were manifest in monuments and commemorative services, as they had been in the Mass in Time of War. Clergy played an important pastoral role in comforting families of fallen soldiers, just as relics, votive tablets, and other physical objects of memorialization honoured the war dead.

As wide-ranging and as steeped in the secondary literature as Houlihan’s book is, it suffers from a significant lack of primary source evidence. The author acknowledges this in his preface, noting how hard it is to find archival traces of “prayers, fears, and suffering.” As a result, he asserts that his book “is a religious history that gives an impressionistic portrait” (15). It is of course true that this kind of source material is hard to come by, which is why studies of the interior lives of ordinary people are so often local or micro-historical in nature. Repeatedly, Houlihan makes large generalizations based on scant evidence, as in the case of his assertion that Catholics were worried about the impact of the outbreak of war on the coming harvest. This stands to reason, but the statement, “To many Catholics, war was another cyclical plague, redolent of the sinful human condition; it was not cause for celebration” is supported only by one memoir from a Lower Austrian domestic servant and three secondary sources (48). To give another example, a single diary from an Austrian soldier provides the supporting evidence for the conclusion that “soldiers who had to experience the daily horrors of battle often used their faith to cope” (70). Similarly, a single photo of a church service in Weimar Germany along with two references to secondary sources serves to counter the prevailing historiographical view of declining public piety after the First World War (260-261). And no explanation is provided for why a case study of Tyrol would serve to explain the relationship between military chaplains and soldiers throughout Germany and Austria-Hungary (81-82). In sum, while there is little reason to doubt that traditional Catholic religious practices persisted in rural Central Europe during and after the war, Houlihan’s wide-ranging study of this topic makes overly large claims which rest on overly thin evidentiary foundations. Simply put, it is impossible to discern whether or not the phenomena he describes are generally true for early twentieth century Catholicism in Germany and Austria-Hungary, since the his source material is drawn unsystematically from a wide array of regions and positions within Catholicism. He would be far more successful building his case through a series of studies like his useful regional analysis of German military chaplains in occupied France (Houlihan, Patrick J. “Local Catholicism as Transnational War Experience: Everyday Religious Practice in Occupied Northern France, 1914–1918.” Central European History 45, no. 2 (June 2012): 233–67), where his mastery of the secondary literature is combined with a solid and representative collection of evidence.

A Crusade, a Holy War: Protestant Preaching in War-time, 1914.

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 4 (December 2014)

A Crusade, a Holy War: Protestant Preaching in War-time, 1914.

By Manfred Gailus, Technische Universität Berlin

This article is based on “Ein Gott, der Fahnen entrollt,” zeitzeichen: Evangelische Kommentare zu Religion und Gesellschaft, 7 July 2014, available at http://www.zeitzeichen.net/schwerpunkt/fruehere-schwerpunkte/kirchen-und-1-weltkrieg/ . Our thanks to John S. Conway for his translation of Manfred Gailus’ text.

For the Berlin Court and Cathedral preacher Bruno Doehring, preaching to a large crowd from the steps of the Reichstag in a spontaneous service on 2 August 1914 was the high point of his life. The war had hardly got underway, but Doehring expressed in his inflammatory address all the main themes of Protestant war theology. This war, he told the crowd, had been forced on Germany. As a result, this could be seen as a perfectly justified war of defense against a conspiracy of surrounding enemies.

Yes, if we didn’t have justice and a clear conscience on our side, if we didn’t feel – I should almost say implicitly – God’s presence, which encompasses our flags and leads our Kaiser to take up his sword and call for a crusade and a holy war, then we should be shaking in our shoes with timidity. But now we will boldly give a defiant answer, one which is the most German of all: We Germans fear God, and nothing else in the world.

This patriotic war-time euphoria which gripped so many Germans in the late summer of 1914 was accompanied by a wave of religious enthusiasm. In the church the heightened sense of comradeship brought about by the events of August was seen as the beginning of a new era. The outbreak of war was enthusiastically greeted by many Protestants (and hardly less by many Catholics). The war raised the level of religious fervor and was theologically justified as a “holy war” or “righteous war” undertaken by Christian Germany against an imagined world of enemies, consisting of sinners or heathen or godless barbarians. Pastors, theological professors and publicists all took this historic moment to be a clear signal from God calling the people back to faith and the church from the allurements of faithlessness.

On 11 August 1914, the leaders of the Prussian Protestant Church, which was by far the largest in the country, issued the following declaration: “Seemingly lifeless signs of faith are awakening once more….The fields are white and ripe for a spiritual harvest.” But what did these leaders mean by conjuring up this somewhat questionable image? Clearly they could expect a great deal of suffering, death and distress, which would lead to a new and more realistic sense of the need to take life seriously. This would put an end to the too long period of peace since 1870-71 which had induced indifference and a frivolous superficiality of life. Now the need for faith, the church, communion, pastoral care and prayer would once more be recognized.

Early reports in the first days and weeks of the war seemed to confirm such expectations. Years later, Pastor Paul Vetter, in Berlin Friedenau, recalled almost nostalgically the enthusiasms of those late summer days. On 5 August, in response to an edict sent out by the Kaiser ordering a “day of prayer in war-time,” his church was almost overwhelmed by the number of those who wanted to participate.

At first we planned to have an overflow evening service, then an extra early morning service. In fact we had to have five services. When the church was filled up by 10 a.m. the parishioners got the off-duty pastors to leave their studies and hold an extra service in the parish hall, and even to have the children’s room opened up, because everyone was so eager to have the chance of hearing God’s word. And this continued Sunday by Sunday, even though we organized every evening special war-time prayer services.

The desire to take part in communion services was enormous. Quite often there would be a spontaneous request to have a special communion service if a sudden command to march off was ordered. Or someone would knock on the church office door and call out: “Pastor, I can’t stay for the communion service. But please give me a comforting word to live and die by.” Young couples now sought to have a church war-time wedding, including quite a number who had already been married by a civil rite and who now “because of the shattering seriousness of the outbreak of the war wanted to have God’s blessing for their union and for the baptism of their children, which for so long they had neglected or despised.”

The Protestant churches put all their spiritual and material resources behind the war effort. There was even talk of a spiritual mobilization campaign. As evidence of this hugely patriotic enthusiasm, we can point to the petition signed by 172 Berlin pastors in which they protested against the clergy’s exclusion from active military service, and sought to obtain permission to have the honor, like other professions, of defending their country in the front lines. But in general this strongly expressed desire to take up arms was rejected by the church bureaucrats. Only young ordinands were allowed to volunteer their services, i.e. those who were not yet fully established or had families. Pastors in office were to stay there and serve the cause on the home front. They were called as preachers, pastors and publicists to advance the nation’s collective cause by upholding the people’s patriotism, readiness to sacrifice, and maintaining confidence in the final victory. If pastors were called up, they would be serving as chaplains or ambulance workers, i.e. not with weapons. And in fact, during the course of the war approximately 1400 pastors were posted as chaplains.

On the home front, the pastors’ contributions consisted mainly of highly morale-boosting services, with special “war sermons” or “prayers in time of war”, which were often held every evening. Later on, a carefully organized system of pastoral care was developed through letters sent to the soldiers at the front, which brought greetings from home as well as uplifting spiritual messages. On top of this, a service for sending parcels was arranged to bring the soldiers gifts from loved ones. At the same time, the pastors were keen to demonstrate their care for the families affected by the war, and especially for the war widows. Finally we should note the very considerable financial support given by churches, church organizations or well-endowed parishioners to the government-sponsored War Loans, as well as the numerous occasions on which parishes donated their church bells to be melted down for the war effort.

War sermons were very much in demand, and became the hall-mark of Protestant responses to the outbreak of the war. Pastor Ferdinand Vogel was one of those who had taken his wife to join the crowds rejoicing on the main street Unter der Linden on the evening of July 31. In his memoirs, he made a point of describing the scene, and then on August 23 he had preached his first war-time sermon in the Sophia Church on the text of Romans 8. 31-9, with the stirring words: “If God be for us, who can be against us?” This was the spirit, the pastor claimed, which prevailed throughout the country in those weeks.

Of course the number of those who are against us is not small. Not only in Europe, but even in Japan, an island nation in far east Asia, there are those who hate us or are envious. So we won’t be surprised if others also join in. But we have Luther’s great hymn to comfort us: ‘A mighty fortress is our God’, which is so appropriately used by our congregations in this time of war.

At the same time, in contrast to many other pastors, Vogel did not allow himself to overly indulge in patriotic rhetoric, since his sermon also included prudent passages calling for circumspection. “What right do we have as a people, he asked his parishioners, to claim that God is on our side? Why should we expect God to be with us, and not with those who oppose us? Of course we know that God deals not just with individuals but also with the destinies of whole peoples. Up to now God has given the Germans a great deal of support with which to build up his Kingdom. Look at Luther’s deeply spiritual powers of belief, the lofty flights of thoughts which are to be found in Schiller and Kant, or the depth of commitment to our people as seen in Bismarck or the old Kaiser, which they turned into legislated steps for social improvements. Yes, God has indeed called the German people to a great and glorious destiny.”

Very frequently these pastors referred in their sermons to the heroic spirit of the “Wars of Liberation” against Napoleon a hundred years earlier. The significant difference was that in 1914-18 it was not German territory which was occupied by foreign troops, but rather that all the most important theatres of war lay outside Germany’s borders. This fact was ignored in the fervor of patriotic enthusiasm. One of those in the forefront of jingoistic preachers was Bruno Doehring, already mentioned above, and his various colleagues in the Berlin Cathedral. He was born in 1879 in Mohrungen in East Prussia, the son of a farmer. In 1914 as a young pastor he was promoted by the Kaiser to be a Court and Cathedral Preacher. During the war, and because of it, this young and hitherto unknown country pastor became one of the best known preachers in the nation’s capital. His sermons were printed with large circulations. The titles of his collected war-time sermons say it all: A Mighty Fortress. Sermons from a Testing Time (1915), Religion on the Battlefield. Impressions and Reflections (1916), and God and the Germans. Thoughts for the Present Day (1917). Particularly notable was his sermon of 15 April 1917 when he preached to a congregation of between two and three thousand people in the Cathedral. The original enthusiasm of August 1914 for a quick victory had been replaced by a disillusioned sober assessment of the war’s experiences. Great controversy was raging about Germany’s war aims and about possible negotiations for peace. “Our enemies,” so Doehring claimed, “are trying to shatter our innermost faith and trust in God for our mission. But Germany will never capitulate, even when we fall in heroic sacrifice for our nation. If Christ dwells in our people, then even if we are murdered as the Jews murdered Jesus, then a new faith in Germany will arise from our graves.” Indeed, in his address Doehring painted a picture of the German people as a redemptive force, whose nearness to God had given them the mission of calling a lost world back to God.

What other people could undertake this task to save the world from the chaos around them? There can be no doubt that only a strong and courageous people can do this. So we must remain united and be led by men filled with God’s spirit. We have got to find those courageous elements who demonstrate exactly the opposite from the materialist-minded English, or the blindly hateful French, or the violence-loving Russians, or the treacherous Italians, or the bestial Rumanians, let alone the mendacious and greedy followers of the so-called mighty American dollar.

Doehring appealed to his hearers to remain strong in their faith and love, since God still had great things in hand for Germany and the Germans. In fact the tone of this sermon presaged the party line of the Fatherland Party which was to spring up a few months later, and which campaigned with fanatical zeal for the retention of all annexations in a truly imperialistic confidence of eventual victory.

This was the prevailing tone of war sermons. Only a few pastors adopted a more peaceful line. Amongst these men were the five Berlin pastors—Karl Aner, Walter Nithack-Stahn, Otto Pless, Friedrich Rittelmeyer and Rudolf Wieland—who in October 1917 issued a declaration in support of the Peace Resolutions passed by the majority of the Reichstag in July 1917. In view of what they called the “catastrophic consequences of war” they called on all Christians to reject the idea of using war as a means of settling international disputes, and instead to campaign for peace. The great majority of their clerical colleagues found such ideas to be outrageous. They immediately drafted up a counter-blast, which was signed by 160 of the capital’s pastors . “There are only two things in store for Germany: victory or defeat. Once we have achieved victory, that will be the time to show the English and French that we are ready to practice reconciliation. But in the meantime we are still entitled in the sight of God and man to righteous anger against our enemies. And therefore we will hold off from any offers of reconciliation until the enemy is defeated and ourselves and our children have secured peace and freedom.”

Such was the prevailing tone amongst these pastors in the fourth year of the war. Anyone who did not subscribe to such a view of the need for victory was quickly accused of being un-Protestant, even un-German. And it was this tone of unyielding militancy which could be seen in the founding of the Fatherland Party on the anniversary of Germany’s victory at Sedan on 2 September 1917. Numerous pastors, even some complete synods, church organizations and clubs were quick to join. And it is easy enough to trace a direct line between this kind of nationalist-conservative mentalities to the later German National People’s Party of the Weimar Republic, or to the militia groups and the subsequent radical nationalist associations such as the Stahlhelm and other supporters of the new Nazi Party in the post-war years.

“The fields are white and ready for a spiritual harvest” was the joyful proclamation made by the Prussian Protestant Church Council when war was declared. But at the end of the war many branches of the Protestant Churches experienced a collective spiritual collapse. Defeat had brought to an end the 500 years of Hohenzollern rule. And the subsequent democratic revolutions of 1918-19 seemed to be wholly disastrous. Many shattered people wanted to know from their pastors how God could have allowed this to happen. The pastor of the Good Shepherd Church in Friedenau, who had recorded the throngs coming to church in August 1914, was now obliged to deal with his own reservations about preaching at the end of the war in 1918. “The question, what should I preach about, seemed so easy and yet was so difficult, all the more because the nation’s defeat was so sudden after we had put so much effort into maintaining hope and trust.” The end of the war raised agonizing questions amongst the members of the congregations about God’s righteousness, which were not easily answered in either sermons or pastoral counseling.

The young Court and Cathedral preacher Bruno Doehring, already prominent for his fanatical war sermons, now at the end of the war became one of the significant propagators of the so-called “stab-in-the-back” theory. This attributed Germany’s defeat not only to the military superiority of their known enemies on the battle fields, but also to the decisive contribution of those treacherous and secretive elements who had betrayed Germany at home. The only way to regain Germany’s political resurrection would be to return to those values which had made Germany great, namely God, Jesus Christ, Martin Luther, Bismarck and Adolf Stoecker. It was in this sense that Doehring was to use his position as a political preacher and to combat Germany’s new and first democratic experiment in the years that lay ahead.

Comment by John Conway:

But what could the pastors say? They held a position of authority and stature in the parish, and were easily accessible. They were supposed to provide not only personal moral uplift to individuals but to nourish the parish’s corporate loyalty to the state. In any case, they lacked the knowledge or the capacity to be critical of the nation’s political or military leaders. The pastors’ conservative milieu, their nationalist sympathies and their loyalty to their God-given Emperor all induced them to play the expected role of spiritually equipping their parishioners for war. To have uttered a dissenting voice against the widespread feelings of the majority would have evoked tremendous resentment or even hostility. No pastor, even today, wants to play that role. To be sure, their readiness to predict Germany’s imminent victory, or to ascribe this to divine approval, or to demonize Germany’s enemies as agents of Satan, were regrettable features, which for the most part were replaced by more appropriate lamentations. But the inevitable conflation and contradiction of political and pastoral claims in war-time needs to be reckoned with. After all, I can myself recall that in September 1939 we all went to church to pray for God’s guidance and protection for our armed forces. And Bob Dylan surely expressed a widespread opinion when he wrote:

The First World War, boys

It came and it went

The reason for fighting I never did get

But I learned to accept it

Accept it with pride,

For you don’t count the dead

When God’s on your side.