An Apostle of Peace in an Era of War

Thank you, David Ross, for inviting me to speak about a man whom everyone here loves and admires. It’s an honor to be on this stage with such illustrious speakers.

Princess Maria-Anna, Ambassador Habsburg, Father Abbot, Father Matlak, other distinguished speakers, and guests, I must admit to some feeling of trepidation and intimidation in the face of speaking about Blessed Emperor Karl of Austria in the midst of his family members and other experts on his saintly life and even saintlier death. But I will count on his intercession for wise words to impart on us all today.

Many aspects of Blessed Karl’s life can and should be admired.

He was an obedient child of his parents.
He was a loving husband and father.
He was the devoted head of his domestic church.
He was a courageous soldier.
He was a faithful emperor and king.
He was a saint in accepting his suffering and death.

Most people would be lucky to obtain just one of these virtues in a long life, yet he attained them all in just 34 years on this earth.

I will not detail those great virtues here today; they are well-known to so many of us already. Instead, I would like to focus on one particular aspect of Blessed Karl’s life, one which is perhaps the most relevant to our times: his desire for and love of peace. He has been dubbed “The Emperor of Peace,” and that he was. But I would go even further. I would argue that Blessed Emperor Karl of Austria was an “Apostle of Peace.” And we in the 21st century desperately need to listen to the Gospel of Peace that Blessed Karl proclaimed in his day, as the news of this past week makes abundantly clear. In fact, I believe that his message of peace is one of the primary reasons for the Holy Spirit’s work in the Church today expanding devotion to this great man of peace.

The Origins of our Bellicose Society

Most of us here recognize that Western culture—what was once Christendom—is in crisis. Society has collectively rejected God, and the effects of that repudiation cannot be underestimated. One result is that we live in an era in which wars and rumors of war abound. We must ask ourselves: how did we get here? Why do we seem more barbarous than our European ancestors?

It’s hard to truly pinpoint the historical origin of our current bellicose society. If we go back far enough, we can blame the Protestant Revolution, which tore a united Christendom apart. Or we can point fingers at the Enlightenment, which exalted man over God. And of course there’s the French Revolution, during which man sought to impose those secular Enlightenment principles upon a populace through violence, and even sought to extinguish the Church from the world. All these events are factors, to be sure.

But to pinpoint the cause of our modern love of war, we must look to the second decade of the 20th century: an era in which the whole civilized world seemed collectively to lose its civilization, as well as its sanity. Most political commentators today consider World War II as the turning point in the West, but I would argue that we are all children of the 1910’s and of World War I in particular.

During this era a number of giant figures controlled the world stage, from Woodrow Wilson…to David Lloyd George…to Georges Clemenceau…to Vladimir Lenin. These men, and many of the advisors who surrounded them, saw the world as a grand chess board, of which they were masters. Human suffering and misery were no consideration as they sought to reform the world according to their malformed ideals.

Onto this stage in 1916 walked a young man—only 29 years old—slight in stature and unassuming in nature, but strong of mind and soul. He was in so many ways unlike these other so-called “great” men. Most importantly, unlike them, he was a saint. And saints often have an impact far more lasting than supposed “great” men. This was of course Blessed Emperor Karl of Austria. With the exception of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, Blessed Karl was the only sane man in a room full of the insane (and it should be noted that Tsar Nicholas has been canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church—saintliness and sanity are directly related!). As French poet Anatole France stated of Blessed Karl: “The only honest man to emerge during this war was Karl of Austria; but he was a saint and nobody listened to him.”

The Realities of Modern War

What often sets apart saints is their ability to see what the rest of us can’t see. They are touched with the wisdom of God, and so can perceive realities that are unclear to even the most educated and intelligent of us. This was true of Blessed Karl. He saw the reality that the world had radically changed in the 20th century, a century of technological “progress,” the age of the machine. The consequences of these changes were not recognized by his contemporaries, and, even though today we live fully immersed in the world that progress created, most of us still don’t grasp all its implications. Blessed Karl saw it before anyone else.

He particularly understood how a machine-dominated world would impact warfare. War is always hell, and it always represents a failure. Yet warfare—particularly European warfare after the continent had been Christianized—was much different before the 20th century. Strange to say, but it was more civilized. War, though still terrible, had boundaries which had resulted both from the political framework of the times and from the limitations of weaponry.

If one European nation wished to make war on another nation, typically it would attack the other nation’s army. Eventually one side would realize it was losing and ask for a peace treaty. Civilian casualties happened, of course, but the idea of targeting civilians was both morally abhorrent, as well as militarily infeasible due to more limited weapons technology. Further, the idea of “total warfare”—fighting until the other side is completely destroyed, was also unheard of, for the same reasons: it was morally abhorrent to any Christian as well as militarily infeasible. I don’t want to glamorize war of any time or place, yet it can’t be denied that war was far less evil before the 20th century than after.

It’s true that the Thirty Years’ War and Napoleon’s wars killed millions. Yet this death toll was not due to the targeting of civilians or advanced weaponry, but instead from the auxiliary consequences of warfare, such as famine and disease. There simply did not exist the ability to directly kill millions of people. And further, the political systems in place—particularly before the Protestant Revolution and then leading up to the French Revolution almost 300 years later—did not foster a desire for massive bloodshed.

At the beginning of the 20th century, however, a perfect and demonic storm arose. Now nations had the mechanized ability to unleash hell on their enemies, and the old political systems (by which I mean monarchies) were either in the distant past or incredibly weakened, to the point of collapse. Of course, no one realized this when the insanity of World War I began. Most operated under the assumptions of the past, and didn’t foresee that this war—the Great War—would be like no other war in history. It would be fought with machines of incredible destruction, bringing misery and death on scales unheard of, at times in order to gain control of less than a football field of land. Stand Strong: 365 Devo... Check Amazon for Pricing.

And it’s important to note that the treaties that contributed to the origin of this war were signed in an earlier, more civilized era, one in which coming to another country’s defense didn’t mean the potential total destruction of your country and an overthrow of your political system. The tragic assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand should have been relegated to a localized conflict of short duration. If the year had been 1314 instead of 1914, that is likely what would have happened. However, the great leaders of the day, without exception, instead plunged the world into a brutal and total war. What should have been a local conflict resolved in short order became a global war that destroyed a generation and changed the trajectory of Western Civilization. In fact I’d say it marked the beginning of Western Civilization’s end.

A Man of Peace

Why did Blessed Karl see what no one else could see? As I said, he was a saint, and saints perceive things the rest of us don’t. But grace builds on nature, and Blessed Karl was born into a family of peace. Through centuries of Habsburg reign over large parts of Europe, this family ruled differently than other kings and emperors. When disputes arose among nations, most leaders resorted to a military response: to war. But the Habsburgs responded in the exact opposite way: instead of war, they resorted to love. Particularly, married love. They formed alliances through dynastic marriages, creating a literal sacramental union between nations and peoples. There’s even a saying to reflect this reality: “Others make wars, but you, happy Austria, marry.”

When a Burgundian duchy became vacant in 1477, a Habsburg prince married a Burgundian princess and gained rule over all the Netherlands. Then a Habsburg duke married a Bohemian princess, and when her native Czech dynasty died out in 1526, the dukes of Austria became kings of Bohemia. The same type of dynastic marriages led to Habsburg rule over Hungary, Spain, and other dominions. All of these royal changes could have led to war; instead they were peacefully transitioned through sacramental love.

So peace was, in a very real sense, in Blessed Karl’s blood. When everyone else thought war was the only option, Blessed Karl recognized the lie. And once he became emperor, he put his determination to strive for peace into action. When he came to the throne in 1916 he immediately stated, “I will do everything to banish in the shortest possible time the horrors and sacrifices of war, to win back for my peoples the sorely-missed blessings of peace, insofar as this can be reconciled with the honour of our arms, the essential living requirements of my lands and their loyal allies and the defiance of our enemies.” These were more than just lofty-sounding words: they sent a clear signal to both his German allies and the opposing forces that he was serious about peace and wasn’t just a vassal to German warmongering.

Then, two years later, when he renounced participation in affairs of state in November 1918, his final statement began, “Ever since my accession I have tried ceaselessly to lead my peoples out of the horrors of a war for whose inception I bear no trace of blame.” Blessed Karl’s reign, in other words, was bookended by a deep desire for peace.

To the warmongers – including his German allies and even many of Karl’s own generals – such talk always sounded weak and compromising. Yet of course Blessed Karl didn’t care; his priority wasn’t pleasing German generals, it was doing all he could to end the war.

Blessed Karl didn’t just speak of peace; he actively worked for it. He made many concrete attempts to end the war; doing so was always his top priority.

Soon after becoming Emperor, Blessed Karl initiated secret peace talks with the Allied forces. His brother-in-law Sixtus, a member of the French army, served as a conduit to communicate with both the French and English governments. United Kingdom Prime Minister Lloyd George was receptive to Blessed Karl’s initiative, but these talks ultimately came to nothing, due to a secret agreement—unknown to Blessed Karl—that the UK and France had with Italy promising parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to Italy if Italy would enter the war on the Allied side.

These secret negotiations later came back to haunt Blessed Karl. When his German allies found out what he was doing, they took steps to keep the Austro-Hungarian Empire locked into the war effort.

On August 1, 1917, Pope Benedict XV published a “Peace Note,” which offered a seven-point peace plan for ending the war. This peace note included many concrete suggestions—suggestions that, if followed, would have engendered a very different—and much better—post-war world. For example, he urged that the warring nations seek from each nation no payments (that is, “indemnities”) for the damages and costs of the war. Further, each side should evacuate foreign territories occupied during the war.

Needless to say, the warring nations’ leaders rejected this proposal out of hand. The British wanted to enforce additional stipulations on the Central Powers before even considering it; France and Italy didn’t even respond. The United States under Woodrow Wilson thought it was a good opportunity to lecture the pope on American ideals. German leaders also rejected the plan. These so-called great leaders knew better than the pope. KJV Holy Bible: Giant ... Thomas Nelson Check Amazon for Pricing.

So everyone rejected the plan—everyone, that is, except Blessed Emperor Karl, standing out again as the only sane man in a world of insanity. He wholeheartedly endorsed it.

Blessed Karl also reached out to the Americans in his efforts to achieve peace. It’s likely Blessed Karl suspected this outreach would come to nothing, but he was willing to be a fool for Christ’s—and peace’s—sake, so he explored every avenue. He correctly recognized that Woodrow Wilson was the only figure who could potentially bring about a “peace without victory”—in other words, a peace that didn’t involve the humiliation of any nation.

Blessed Karl sent Heinrich Lammasch, one of his advisors and a well-known lover of peace, to speak with Wilson Administration official George D. Herron. Blessed Karl went so far as to instruct Lammasch to express that the Austro-Hungarian Empire was willing to engage with Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” as a basis for peace, including a complete re-organization of the Empire under a more federalist model, in order to satisfy Wilson’s push for an American-style “self-determination.” Sadly, however, President Wilson decided that the only form of “self-determination” he would accept would be the complete destruction of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Blessed Karl’s efforts for peace were evident not only in the Empire’s relations with other countries, but also in his internal reforms. Upon becoming Emperor, he offered a general amnesty to political prisoners, to show that he was willing to run the Empire under a different model, one more in line with the democratic spirit of the times. Likewise, he created a Ministry of Social Welfare to help those citizens of the Empire who were suffering due to the war. While this move was driven by Christian charity, it was also an effort to stave off radicalization of his people, which he knew would spur them to support war.

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