WW 1: A Christian war
World War I and the Papacy
By George J. Marlin
SATURDAY, 02 AUGUST 2014
One hundred years ago this week, Christian Europe commenced the horrific Great War that spread globally, raged from August 1914 to November 1918, and was responsible for the death of more than 15-million soldiers and civilians.
In The World Crisis, Winston Churchill’s six-volume account of the struggle, he observed that the warriors employed “Every outrage against humanity or international law.” And when it was over, “torture and cannibalism were the only two expedients that the civilized, scientific, Christian states had been able to deny themselves: they were of doubtful utility.”
The conflict’s catalyst? On June 28, 1914, the Roman Catholic heir to the Austrian-Hungarian throne, Archduke Ferdinand and his morganatic wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, were gunned down in Sarajevo, Bosnia, by a Serbian terrorist, Gavrilo Princip. The Serbian nationalist assassin, committed to liberating his Slavic people from the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, believed his crime would strike a blow for freedom.
During the next month, as historian Christopher Clark puts it, European rulers “who prided themselves on their modernity and rationalism, stumbled through crisis after crisis and finally convinced themselves that war was the only answer.”
While some monarchs pleaded for peace, war plans designed years earlier were dusted off, ultimatums were delivered, and general mobilizations of armed forces commenced.
On August 3, 1914, Germany declared war on France and invaded Belgium. Britain, committed to Belgium neutrality, declared war on Germany the next day. By month’s end, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey found themselves at war with Britain, France, Russia, Japan, Serbia, and Montenegro...
[link:http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2014/world-war-i-and-the-papacy.html|]
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