Riti di Guerra: Religione e politica nell’Europa della Grande Guerra by Sante Lesti (review)

Sante Lesti’s Riti di guerra. Religione e politica nell’Europa della Grande Guerra deals with efforts mainly in France and Italy during World War I to rally Catholics to the cause of war and perhaps to show that they were just as patriotic as everybody else. This involved a number of projects in both countries, and Lesti focuses on attempts to dedicate to the Sacred Heart either the “nation” (as in the French case) or the army (as in Italy). Later some undertook the task of dedicating the “Allies.” That who or what should be consecrated depended on each nation’s historical situation, a conundrum that adds to the value of Lesti’s provocative and well-researched book. Both prewar Italy and France had famously disastrous histories of Church-state relations. In France, the Revolution, starting in 1789, and the Third Republic, particularly the Dreyfus affair and its fallout, pushed the Church over the political cliff. Italy’s Risorgimento and subsequent anticlerical governments shocked religious authority there and even dispossessed the pope. In both countries World War I presented opportunities for some reconciliation. In France, Cardinal Léon Adolphe Amette, archbishop of Paris, led the way in pledging the nation to the Sacred Heart. In Italy, the Franciscan Agostino Gemelli and the Piedmontese bishop Angelo Bartolomasi joined Armida Barelli, the leader of Catholic Action’s Women’s Union. Their aim differed from the French by focusing on the army before they broadened their spectrum to include all of the Allied nations.

Some raised questions as to why all this was necessary. France had precedents of such endeavors; indeed, not too many years before, Pope Leo XIII had consecrated all humanity to the Sacred Heart. The French republican government, moreover, had reservations. By sanctioning the Church’s plans, it welcomed the chance to bring Catholics on board, although up to a point. Part of the ceremony included prayers for forgiveness and, considering the anticlerical measures over the past century or so, there was much to forgive. But the state would not see it that way. Apprehension dogged the republicans that the consecration would end up as a religious slap in the face and play into the hands of the monarchists. After all, in the 1790s the Vendée rebels had embraced the Sacred Heart as their emblem against the revolution. Consequently, Lesti recounts Paris’ pressure to purge or censor parts of the ceremony and the episcopal reactions to those pressures, often but not always resistant. He adds here some insights into the distinction between the Christian and the national religions. In Italy, resistance to the consecration of the Army came from Pope Benedict XV, anxious not to appear too partisan in the war. The Italians’ task was made easier, however, in that neither the state nor the nation participated but the soldiers themselves. “We Catholics,” Gemelli wrote in May 1915, shortly after Italy’s declaration, “until yesterday worked to prevent the war. Today we must give our life, our activity, all of our heart, our genius to those who hold in their hands the fatherland’s destiny.” Along the way, Lesti introduces us to Benito Mussolini in the trenches, who had little use for the acts, and Angelo Roncalli, the young Lombard priest and future Pope John XXIII who did and took a quite active role in it all. On January 5, 1917, the Italian Army was consecrated to the Sacred Heart.