Abstract
Reviewed by: Oliver Logan, University of East Anglia, UK
Religion during World War I has become a major historiographical topic. All of the predominantly Christian belligerent states had military chaplaincy services. People widely turned to religion in the face of the terrors of war, although initial religious enthusiasm was liable to slacken with the unexpected prolongation of hostilities. Religious symbols and rituals provided solace and frameworks of meaning, as did cult objects, which, at the crudest level, were looked to for protection. Here Catholicism is of particular interest because of its symbolic richness and also because of the tensions between the Papacy’s pacifism and the patriotic commitments of national churches. The historiography has suffered from a relative paucity of transnational studies. A notable exception, of particular relevance here, is Claudia Schlager’s, Kult und Krieg: Herz Jesu – Sacré Coeur – Christus Rex im deutsch-franzözisher Vergleich 1914–1925 (2011), which has provided the fullest treatment for Germany until now. While broad in its coverage of the religious context, its focus is on the related cults of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and Christ the King in wartime France and Germany. Houlihan’s work covers two territorial blocs in which relations between the Catholic Church and the State were very different and where, accordingly, the clergy supported the war effort for significantly different reasons. In Imperial Germany, Catholics were a mistrusted minority. Ironically, this made for significant parallels with the situations in France and Italy where there were acute problems in Church–State relations. In all three countries the hierarchy and clergy gave strong support to the war effort in order to strengthen the position of the Catholic Church in national life; in Germany, Houlihan asserts, ‘the war showed Catholicism breaking out of its minority ideological ghetto of the Catholic milieu’ (260). In Austria-Hungary, by contrast, the Catholic Church enjoyed a privileged position, although the catch-phrase ‘alliance of throne and altar’, which Houlihan reiterates, should perhaps have been scrutinized more critically; the ursine embrace of the Catholic Church by the Habsburg government had not been altogether relaxed with the concordat of 1855. A key point is that the Catholic Church in the Dual Monarchy developed a chaplaincy service that was notably better organized than the regionally fragmented Catholic chaplaincy services in Germany. Doubtless the Josephine heritage of a reorganized parochial pastoral system and, with it, of the status of clergy as public servants provided valuable precedents for the new military pastoral system.
Houlihan’s main concern is with how Catholic piety helped soldiers and their families to cope with the horrors of mechanized and protracted warfare, with bereavement and with national defeat. Attention to the latter issue is perhaps the most innovative aspect of his contribution to the historiography of the war. He seeks to contest an allegedly dominant master-narrative of a secularization process accelerated by the conflict, pointing to the vitality of Catholicism during its course and in its aftermath. Schlager’s more subtly structured thesis is that the war accelerated already ongoing processes both of consolidation of Catholicism and of apostasy from it.
Schlager’s focus is on the exploitation of the Sacred Heart cult for nationalistic purposes; she has described it as the principal war devotion in France and Germany, the principal officially promoted one, that is. Although she has made some use of memoirs, her main sources are devotional periodicals. Houlihan’s main sources are memoirs and letters. His book gives a more rounded picture of the piety of soldiers and their families, greatly expanding on the brief but valuable indications in Benjamin Ziemann’s study of Bavaria, War Experiences in Rural Germany 1914–1923 (in German 1997, English edition 2007). Houlihan actually says little about the Sacred Heart cult. He emphasizes the supreme importance of devotion to the Virgin Mary, particularly relevant in the guise of the Mater dolorosa. Notably important also were St Joseph, the patron of a good death, St Sebastian, the patron of soldiers, St Jude, defender of lost causes, St Michael for the Germans and St Wenceslas for the Czechs. Soldiers extensively wore a wide range of amulets, mostly of a more or less religious character. Houlihan argues that this ‘stereotypically archaic and even anti-modern religion’ (264), regarded as ‘superstitious’, ‘backward’ or ‘womanish’ by Protestants and liberals, was, in combination with an official theology of war as a divine purgation, precisely what best served to provide consolation and an interpretative framework for combatants and their families. This was partly because it triggered memories of home and local community. The ministry of the Church and shared pious practices in fact played an important role in providing links between the military front and the home one. Houlihan’s picture of the religious practices of these predominantly rural Catholic populations is very similar to the one presented by historians of Italy, although in the Italian case there was apparently more attachment to local saints. The level of religious instruction in southern Italy was doubtless lower than in Austria and Germany. Ultimately, however, even there, the limited capabilities of chaplains’ organizations left soldiers free to create their own private religions.