On August 20, 1914, the invading German Army entered Brussels, marching through Belgium and into northern France. Also on that day, Pope Saint Pius X, the declared anti-modernist “peasant pope,” died suddenly after a short illness. Soon after, in the midst of unfolding war, cardinals from across Europe gathered in Rome to elect the new supreme pontiff, and the mood was anxious. At the conclave in the corridors of the Vatican, Cardinal Felix von Hartmann of Germany greeted his colleague Cardinal DésiréMercier of Belgium, saying, “I hope that we shall not speak of war.” Mercier responded, “And I hope that we shall not speak of peace.” The national rancor between bishops would escalate as the war dragged on, and episcopal enmity and clerical nationalism have become cultural shorthand for the religious experience of the Great War. However, the sound and fury of the bishops has helped to conceal the experiences of ordinary religious believers.

This book argues that, seen through the religious experiences of every-day Catholics from the losing powers, the Catholic story of the Great War challenges standard interpretations of the war's disillusioning legacy. In particular, the study of lived religion for people from the losing powers provides counter-narratives to stories of secularization and artistic modernism. Specifically Catholic forms of belief and practice allowed Catholics in the losing powers to cope with the war's devastation remarkably better than standard cultural histories of secularization and literary modernism would have readers believe. This Catholic spirituality included intercession, sacramentality, dolorous cyclical history in the long term, and worship of female spirituality. These modes of faith provided relief and comfort in extreme situations of distress. Catholic spirituality, both liturgically and theologically, provided traditional means of understanding tremendous upheaval, allowing the Great War's devastating new horrors to be relativized as one episode in the story of human existence. Catholicism portrayed war as necessary suffering, diminished belief in divine-right nationalism, and created a nostalgic vision of idyllic domesticity.