Did A Cardinal Knee Cap A Pope To Promote A Terrible War?

In light of the widespread myth that the Pope is an absolute dictator and that the bishops and Cardinals are his vassals and henchmen - part and parcel of that Brit-atheist tradition that is mentioned in my earlier post, here is a fascinating article by Mike Griffin from the Catholic Peace Fellowship about the possibility that the most prominent Cardinal in America, James Gibbons, intentionally and against the request of Pope Benedict XV failed to lobby for the peace plan that the Pope hoped would end the horrible bloodshed of the First World War.   It is a fascinating look at how complex the issues that Benedict XV faced and, though it doesn't to into it deeply, the complex history the papacy and the widespread suspicions about the intentions of that pope were colored by that history and how those were used by various players in thwarting one of the most tragic failures in the history of that time.  Though the case that Cardinal James Gibbons knee capped the pope in order to promote his own, domestic agenda of swelling the influence of the Catholic church isn't a solid one, it certainly is important because he was hardly the last such Cardinal to act in ways that favored American military policy over the Pope's attempts to bring about peace.  Cardinal Spelman leaps to mind.

The short and fleeting reference to Benedict XV's rejection of "just war theory" is something I hope to read more about because that was certainly one of the worst accomodations that Christians ever made to temporal powers and one of the most blatant violations of the words of Jesus, one which led to centuries of scandal which are used by atheists and others today to attack Christianity and which, itself, has undone so much of the effort to promote justice and the only valid goals of having a church.

It can only be imagined what might have happened if Benedict XV's plan happened, though, if it had succeeded, it may well have prevented the rise of Nazism, itself a response to the defeat of the Germans, and their success as the Allies' terms in the treaty brought about the economic disaster that followed which fed the Nazi movement.   You can't rewind history and predict what would have been if but we can look back and be fairly confident of what did happen because.   No one had clean hands to begin with but no one did afterwards, either.  Wilson, the peace president who, I believe reluctantly, brought us into the war tried to clean his at the peace conference and in his promotion of the League of Nations, only to fail.   The part the American financial establishment and the free media had in all of that is certainly more worthy of condemnation than what Benedict XV did.  They definitely knee capped him when he worked to prevent and end the war.