In modern history, and especially during the era of total war, the papacy has been seen as suffering a decline of influence. Perhaps this was put most starkly in Stalin's infamous quip, “How many divisions does the Pope have?” During the Great War, the papacy certainly did not have the military force it had possessed in earlier eras; however, its moral force was still strong. Indeed, after the loss of the papal states with the formation of Italy in 1870, the Church gained influence as a more impartial spiritual institution, even as it lost political territory.

Presiding during a world war, the pope elected in the conclave of 1914, Benedict XV, remains one of the twentieth century's lesser-known popes in historiography, an “unknown pope” in the words of his most prominent biographer. Often dismissed as a mere steward during a troubled period, Benedict demonstrated the power of religious tradition as an adaptive, not static or reactionary, phenomenon. On the one hand, his diplomatic efforts were aimed toward a preservation of a pre-war sense of order, an international status quo ante bellum, culminating in his famous Peace Note of August 1, 1917. On the other, however, while Benedict kept the pre-war ideal in mind, both his thoughts and his actions reflected his adjustment to the new circumstances. During the war, the Church became a non-partisan diplomatic actor, devoted its material resources to soothing the afflicted, refocused its organizational structure with a new Code of Canon Law, and began to confront new social movements that emerged because of the war, most famously fascism and communism. Thus, unlike previous papacies, Benedict engaged with the modernity of the Great War. Far from reactionary retreat or idle indifference, it was a period that set the tone for the Church's vigorous grappling with modernity during the twentieth century. In many ways, the Great War allowed for growth and consolidation within the Church; it was not a time of senseless and futile waste.