Renovating Christian Charity: Global Catholicism, the Save the Children Fund, and Humanitarianism During The First World War*

Abstract

Abstract This article argues that the Vatican’s involvement in the fledgling stages of the Save the Children Fund helped globalize what began as a local British charity, reshaping Christian humanitarianism as a response to total war. Centred on children as irreproachable war victims and the hope of the future, the ideology of Christian charity and the Vatican’s financial networks helped mobilize resources to combat famine across shattered imperial state structures in Central and Eastern Europe. With diplomatic credentials as a peace advocate, Pope Benedict XV (1914–22) symbolically led this new wave of religious humanitarianism. Attempting to stabilize war-torn societies, Christian humanitarianism towards children was an ideology that overcame wartime British anti-Germanism, raising fears about the spectre of Bolshevism after the Russian Revolution of 1917. In contrast to 19th-century religious mobilization that hardened confessional boundaries against the liberal secular state, however, this was a moment when the Catholic Church as a global religious organization intervened for all people, irrespective of faith commitments. Influencing later human rights developments, religiously informed humanitarianism became forgotten in the Vatican’s aggressive anti-communist diplomacy in the inter-war era. Ecumenical religious charity was important for the modern history of humanitarianism and non-governmental organizations.