Let no man who has held high rank in the Government of any country think now that he has done well or deserves acclamations. So far as his vision led him, he may have tried to do his duty, with foresight, devotion, faithfulness. Yet he has failed. The Government which cannot save its country from war has failed, whatever its other achievements. The new ideas, the new hopes, have not been fully comprehended. And so suspicion and enmity have been allowed to grow steadily, and the thought of war has been constantly in men’s minds, as the inevitable end to which the world was drifting.
The thought of war should have been as impossible as the thought of murder. The press of all nations, instead of pandering to misunderstanding and animosities, should have educated the people, day by day and year by year, until the curse of nationalism was lifted from the world.
For nationalism has been a curse, and will remain a curse, so long as devotion to one country can involve enmity to any other. We are brothers in one boat, as we pass from the unknown to the unknown. Let us learn to understand each other.
Benedict XV
The election of Cardinal della Chiesa was certainly unexpected, and it may be hoped that this element of surprise will
be extended to his general policies. But if his Holiness continues, as Pontiff, to carry out the principles of the Archbishop of Bologna, the Church will lose far more than she can gain. What is needed now is not a saint or a scholar or a skilful administrator, though saintliness and scholarship and executive talent are admirable qualifications. If the Church is to do anything more than merely mark time, or actually lose ground, she requires as her head now a man of profound imagination and unswerving courage. The tendency of the Papacy has been too much toward mechanical routine, the neglect of new opportunities, the discountenancing of new ideas, the refusal of new life. The creative genius of the great artist, the incommunicable imaginative insights of the great novelist or poet or painter, could give the Vatican a new leadership in the spiritual affairs of mankind. We have seen the Pope who condemned Modernism dying of a broken heart because Europe was turned into a field of desolation and slaughter. The impotence of the Pontiff to secure some regard for Christian teachings amongst supposedly Christian nations, is at once the measure of the Church’s weakness and the condemnation of her methods. In the spirit of the Modernists, if not in the spirit of Modernism itself, Benedict XV could remove many of the mountains that stand in the way of the direct line for the Twentieth Century, Limited. Mountains may be picturesque: but, in the wrong place, they are merely a nuisance.
Uncensored
The press has not had an easy task in attempting to gratify the natural desire of the public for dramatic details of the war operations. But even after making the fullest allowances for all difficulties, whether due to the censorship, to broken communications, or to the indiscretions of partisans, one can scarcely congratulate the newspaper world as a whole upon its achievements. In New York, for instance, there have been two or three papers which have maintained reasonable standards; but most of the papers have published and republished so-called news of a kind that should never have found public record. Why should any journal waste time in announcing, in large type, that “the Servians
swear that the enemy will never enter the capital so long as one house stands and one Servian lives”? This is mere bombastic rubbish, and has nothing to do with the patriotism and fortitude of the Servians. The appearance of perpetual “war extras,” with no additional information, but with immense scareheads, is another unpleasant sign of the shallowness and insincerity that we permit in these busy days. Frothy journalism may flourish for the moment: but the public has a better memory than it is sometimes supposed to possess.
“Civilized Warfare”