Pax Romana

A fascinating article in the latest edition of Recusant History on the Guild of the Pope’s Peace, founded to campaign for the implementation of the call in 1915, by the hugely prescient and underrated Pope Benedict XV, for a negotiated peace based, as it would have had to have been, on a reversion the status quo ante bellum.

Had that happened, of course, then there would have been neither any Soviet Union nor, since there would have been no Treaty of Versailles, any Nazi Germany. Disasters from Iraq, to Yugoslavia, to Palestine would have been averted: the last would never have been a distinct territory, and the other two would never have been created at all.

The Prussia that created the first Welfare State, held in unity Teutons and Slavs, and was a union of Catholic and Protestant parts of Europe, would still exist. Whereas a Turkey in which the only political forces were violently secular ultra-nationalism, violent Islamism, and violent Kurdish separatism of a Marxist persuasion, would never have existed.

And what of Britain? The Catholic hierarchy on this island was scandalously hostile to the Guild (which had no formal connection to pacifism, and sought only the implementation of admittedly non-infallible Papal Teaching), and that position, which enjoyed very overwhelming support in the presbyteries and in the pews, is described as “patriotic” and “imperialist”. But was it in fact any such thing?

The Pope’s proposal would have left intact the British Empire, and almost certainly also the United Kingdom as it existed in 1915 – there not only would, but could, have been no rising in Dublin at Easter 1916 if the War had already been over by then. That Empire would then have been free to develop into the Commonwealth, as was already very well underway, but at a natural and sensible pace. America would never have entered the War, and global primacy would never have begun to pass to a power utterly determined to dismantle our Empire with total disregard for the consequences on the ground, a power stridently hostile to former colonies’ preservation of their ties to Britain.

From 2003 onwards, the Papal Teaching (I nearly wrote “admittedly non-infallible”, but neither the just war tradition nor the Christian pacifist tradition, the only positions admitted by the Magisterium, admits of the Iraq War in any way at all) on the Iraq War has been received almost universally in the palaces, presbyteries and pews of the whole Catholic world outside the United States, and even, in view of Obama’s convincing victory among Catholics, within the United States. And that Teaching, too, is the position that truly accords with British and Commonwealth patriotism.

How tragic that too little heed was paid in 2003.

And how tragic that no heed whatever was paid in 1915.