Benedict XV, Pope

BENEDICT XV, Pope. - Giacomo Della Chiesa, b. in Genoa on 21 Nov. 1854 to Giuseppe and Giovanna Migliorati. Of a marquisal family, originating from the dukes of Spoleto, of the same stock as Callixtus II and Berengar II, he descended from Anselmo Della Chiesa, co-lord of Priocca in 1207, while on his mother's side he traced back to Innocent VII. He pursued his classical studies first at the Danovaro Giusso college, then at the seminary lyceum, and graduated in law in 1875 with a dissertation on the «Interpretation of Laws». He entered that same year the Capranica college in Rome and, having obtained his doctorate in theology, received the Sacred Orders there in 1878. Having completed the courses at the Academy of Noble Ecclesiastics in 1882, he was in the Secretariat of State, whence he followed to Spain, as private secretary, the nuncio Mons.

Mariano Rampolla del Tindaro, who, created cardinal and appointed Secretary of State in 1887, immediately called him to the office of minute-writer for Ordinary Affairs, subsequently sending him with special assignments to Vienna in 1889 and in '90. Substitute of the Secretariat of State in 1901, professor of Diplomatics at the Academy, where he had been a student, he continued the high task under the pontificate of Pius X, until, elected in 1907 archbishop of Bologna, he received episcopal consecration from the same Pontiff on 22 Dec. Elevated to the sacred purple in the Consistory of 25 May 1914, he received on the 28th the cardinal's hat and the title of the SS. Quattro Coronati. After three months, on 3 Sept., he was exalted to the pontifical throne, assuming the name of B. XV, in homage - he said - to the illustrious predecessor in the Chair of St. Petronius and of St. Peter, Prospero Lambertini.

He was endowed by nature with a lively intellect, quick and sure intuition, an iron memory, a mind open to broad visions, a magnanimous heart. Slender of person, slightly misshapen in the shoulders, irregular and changeable of countenance, he revealed from his vivid and penetrating eye so robust and noble a spirit as to be transfigured very often into semblances of suggestive grace and a bearing of venerable majesty. Prone to wit and satire, of an impetuous and even choleric disposition, he was ready for gentle cordiality, obliging courtesy, exquisite refinement. Of profound piety, of ingenuous abandonment to prayer, most tenacious in his affections, incapable of rancor, forgetful of every offense, of regal generosity, he triumphed irresistibly over aversions and criticisms, confounding them, imperturbable, with open joviality, with solicitous preference for those who did not know how to be friends, almost as if in gratitude for that duty of exercising the virtue of compassion and forgiveness. Through such marked traits, subduing and attractive at once, he impressed upon souls the impression of a most vigorous personality, a moving and indelible memory.

The unexpected election to the pontificate did not dismay him; although the conditions of the Church, of the Holy See, of the world were grave as never before. The pontificate «restorer in Christ» of Pius X had had to struggle with the extreme efforts of social and political laicism, which had manifested themselves in France, had been reinvigorated on this example everywhere, even in Spain. While the Church, in the concord of the episcopate, in the discipline of the clergy, in the safeguard against modernism, above all in eucharistic fervor, emerged from it reinvigorated, the Holy See in its relations with the States suffered from a detachment that suggested a deliberate and hostile isolation. In the Vatican fourteen nations were diplomatically represented, some of them more in homage to tradition and to the opportunity of observation and control than out of cordiality and devotion of sentiment. And this while a world conflict was beginning, before which the Church and Rome found themselves for the first time in centuries, and when the Holy See, having lost every civil sovereignty, was deprived of every effective shield. What could have been on one side beneficial, in consideration of the papacy's position as in any case neutral, if the world's political conscience had not been averse to recognizing the high spiritual function of the Pontiff outside and above the disputes. The lack of a State did not in fact preserve him from interested pressures, contrary to his mission of peace and civilization which required him on the contrary to be impartial, while it hindered his communications with the Church. Which would not have enjoyed the consideration and protection proper to a non-belligerent sovereign, while the necessary communion of thought and works between the episcopate and the Head of Catholicism ought to have been more urgent and uninterrupted, if for no other reason than what religious life, moral custom, Christian civilization demanded of the pastoral mission and of the pontifical magisterium, during the scourge that was descending upon the peoples. A condition of things that to the incomparable difficulties offered for the most part no example and counsel of precedents from which to draw inspiration; it demands far more than courage, heroism; and genius rather than intelligence. This reality, superior in every respect to forecasts, found in the thought and labor of B. XV an adequate understanding and apostolate.

B. XV in his first encyclical Ad Beattissimi (1 Nov. 1914), tracing the program of his pontificate, revealed in it that unitary fundamental concept to which the historian must refer, in order to treat it well. Supreme moderator of the life and of the world of souls, everything - morality, culture, work, wealth, progress, politics and economics, justice and law - everything he indicated as ordered toward God, according to the doctrine of the Church, considered, with respect to humanity, as mother and guide; exhausting, in its charity, the cycle of life here below in all its ordered manifestations: from the individual to the family, to the class, to the nation, to international relations. From this universal maternity and this universal magisterium, a reflection on earth of divine fatherhood and providence, there descended and took on real religious and social consistency the brotherhood of men, the indissoluble necessity of its discipline among the faithful, as well as the Church's constant love for those who had separated themselves from it or were ignorant of it, and yet had to return to it and learn to love and follow it. Thus all of complex existence, all of the much-vexed human motion, returned to being simplified through this intimate and vital relationship with the Church and in its supreme end - the glory of God and the salvation of souls - pursued by every way, in every field, the sole guarantee of a reconstructing order that passed from the moral world to the material one, from that of individual conscience to that of the collective life of peoples. From such a document, the essence of his pontifical government, as he loved to say and insist, was exclusively religious, no less in the necessarily and contingently political and social activities than in the ecclesiastical and moral ones. An essence summarized in the words written from the very beginning, on 23 Sept. 1914, to Card. Dubillard: «hoc unum velle et unice contendere ut Christi Ecclesiae per tot adversa gradienti, utile praebeamus ministerium», words that echo a few hours before his death: «If the Lord still wants me to work for his Church, I am always ready».

These premises reveal to us first of all the sentiment and the spirit with which he faced the world crisis, its mourning and its ruins. The Church of Christ was for him all that sorrow; all that calamity with which the war dripped blood and tears; all those immortal spirits cast into grief; all those oppressed ones over whom force rose up and violence pressed down. The bloody conflict was not only a monstrous social danger, but also a moral and religious one. He harbored no illusions: the war had not germinated nor was it contained within the limits of a political and economic phenomenon. In it he discerned "the conflagration of the mortal elements fermented in materialism"; the crisis of thought and of conscience of an era. To bring society safely out of it meant not only arresting its suicide, but raising it up to Christian rebirth. That is why, from his very first encyclical, he pronounced before the world, almost absorbed in the cult of violence, the condemnation of war as "a manifestation more hateful than any other of the prevailing moral disorder" and pointed to prayer, penance, the restoration of the rights of God, and submission to the precepts of the Gospel and of the Church as the remedy. What it meant in that autumn of 1914, in the face of an Europe partly in arms, partly on the eve of war, amid the uncontested triumph of material force, to be one against all, against the idea and against the fact; alone against armed force, armed, in his turn, with nothing but love.

And to that end the plan of B. XV was threefold: to invoke the end of the conflict by preparing a lasting peace; to humanize the war; to alleviate all its sufferings. What he dared to do to bring peace back to the world, re-establishing there the triumph of a justice inspired by charity and by a practical vision of the aspirations, the needs of peoples and the actual political possibilities, belongs to a history that, twenty years later, has written yet another chapter, fully illuminating the providence of his warnings and his invocations had they been heeded. In this field his work could only be diplomatic and one of magisterium. It is easier to know the latter; but it is not difficult to guess the former from what he himself hinted at in speeches and letters. A continuous work of exhortation and persuasion that rose to the rank of an irrefutable vocation according to his famous words repeated to Achille Ratti, who recalled them on the eve of succeeding him on the pontifical throne: "They want to condemn me to silence. The Vicar of Christ should not invoke peace. They will not succeed in sealing my lips. Woe if the Vicar of the Prince of peace were mute in the hour of the storm! The spiritual and universal fatherhood with which I am invested makes it a precise duty for me to invite to peace the children who from the opposite barricade slaughter one another. I am and I feel myself the spiritual father of the combatants in the one and in the other camp. No one will be able to prevent the Father from crying out to his own children: peace, peace, peace!"

A work of counsel carried on at every occasion, by all possible means and illustrated by the paternal appeal to peoples and governments, on the first anniversary of the war, by his most solemn allocutions during the conflict and by that note to the Heads of State of 1 Aug. 1917, in which there is concretized a thought until then kept poised in the sphere of principles so as not to expose to criticism, amid such a tumult of passions, the balance of his mission, impartial toward everyone and directed solely to pacification. The "note" urges a stable and honorable peace for all, to be brought about through the reciprocal reduction of armaments and obligatory arbitration, the freedom of the seas, the reciprocal remission of war expenses and credits and of reparations, except in cases of justice and equity, such as that of Belgium, whose independence was to be guaranteed; the evacuation of occupied territories; the settlement of territorial claims according to the aspirations of peoples. A call, this, which is crowned by the famous phrase he uttered, when the international dispute over Wilson's 14 points was already intensifying — a broader but not equally effective paraphrase of the "note": "Nations do not die!" What constituted the fruitful seed of that Christian international law which the second world conflict was to call to a more luminous development. And yet his charitable intent and zealous contribution to avert other wars, to shorten this one which threatened to submerge Europe, did not lack suspicions and sectarian opposition. Content only with divine consolations, and with the unattainable satisfaction of which love is the source even when in vain and unrecognized, he remained firm, constant, imperturbable amid adversities, ingratitudes, human rebellions; resigned to every rebuff, always eager to begin again from the start. Intent only on the good he was accomplishing, he ever turned his tireless activity to the supreme ends, never to particular interests, so as to make impartiality an essential and unmistakable attribute of it.

He cooperated in relieving all misfortunes. His was the greatest and most admirable work of paternal piety, of Christian, social and civil charity, that the world perhaps remembers. It seems the labor of an age, rather than of a single man. Thousands of prisoners unfit for war (1914), of prisoners who were fathers of numerous offspring, or who had exceeded 18 months of imprisonment (1916), were returned to their land; civilian detainees were freed (1915); entire deported populations returned to their domestic hearths (1917); over 30,000 French, English, Belgians, Austrians, hospitalized by Switzerland (1915); Italian tuberculosis patients returned to recover in the mild climate of their homeland (1916); Sunday rest was assured to prisoners (1915); a consecrated tomb granted to the Christians who died at the Dardanelles (1916); to the populations struck by enemy invasion was given the comfort of news of their loved ones (1915). The "Work of Prisoners" in the Vatican palace assumed imposing proportions: seven hundred thousand requests for information, forty thousand for repatriation, five hundred thousand communications to families. Ecclesiastics, nuncios, bishops visited and inspected the concentration camps, interceded, comforted, gave aid. The prayer and mediation of the Pope reached everywhere to mitigate disciplines, to commute sentences, to save the innocent. And if he asked, but did not obtain, the truce of arms at the first Christmas of the war (1914), burial for the fallen on the field (1915) and the prohibition of aerial attack beyond the war zone (1916), Poland (1915-17) and Belgium (1917) had in him their greatest helper. The devastated Balkans, Armenia with a million of its children massacred, and the Maronites of Lebanon (1916-20) and the Christians of Syria and the East struck by disease, famine, and cruelty, hailed in him their most effective protector. And after the war, over the shattered altars, the destroyed workshops, the devastated fields; over misery, famine, epidemics, languishing youth, over the metropolises and nations rendered powerless for life, his beneficent hand was still extended. Russian refugees received his aid through the hands of the "Orthodox" metropolitan Anastasios; their exhausted children took refuge in Crimea, in a sanatorium that bears his name; the persecuted schismatic clergy invoked and obtained protection (1919), just as the appeal of the Jews of America (1916) had already been received on behalf of the massacres of Israelites in Europe. Later Russia was dying of famine amid horrible scenes of barbarism and death. Politics debated and temporized; B. XV proclaimed: "it is the duty of every man to hasten where another man is dying" (1921). And his charity arrived first, once again, as already in Austria, where not only were human beings perishing, but a State was languishing. And Germany and Ireland (1920) and far-distant China (1921) were the object of his solicitude, while the whole world, seeing him again among martyred and desolate childhood, as once the Divine Master among the children, responded to his invitation launched with an encyclical (1920) for the children of Belgium, of central Europe and of Russia (1921). More than a hero of charity, he appeared as the champion of civilization and human brotherhood. The statue erected to him in Constantinople (1920), for having its seat among the infidels and its location between two continents, fully renders this historical truth. And all this, amid innumerable, secret, direct aids to individuals, to families, to institutions, so that of so many requests, even the humblest and most distant and unknown, none remained unheard, many, often, anticipated. Cardinal Gasparri specified that in such work of personal charity, B. XV had disbursed eighty-two million lire.

Such an immense field of solicitude and labors did not distract him from the more immediate one of religious life and of that of the Church herself. If no new errors opposed the defense of doctrine, if proscribed books, after the anti-modernist struggle of Pius X, were reduced in their number and importance, the encyclical on St. Jerome (1919) concerning the method of biblical exegesis remains memorable, as was beneficial the permanence of the disciplinary norms of the anti-modernist oath and the Vigilance Councils. To the Czech-Slovak schism, influenced by the proximity of heterodoxy and its ecclesiastical customs, the Pope indicated the most effective remedy in a zealous perfecting of the seminaries and of the formation of the clergy; a work to which he devoted very particular care in the institution of a Congregation of its own, that "of Seminaries and Universities of Studies" (1915), in whose rules defined as "pedagogically perfect and doctrinally admirable" issued to the seminaries of Italy, the personal imprint of the Pope is evident and preponderant. He promulgated the Code of Canon Law (1917) while saying that he was reaping what his predecessor had sown, after having from the very beginning of his pontificate gathered on the first drafts of the grandiose work the opinions of the bishops, from which the definitive work then developed. He set the basic points of Christian discipline already from the first encyclical in concord and obedience to the authority of the bishops and of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, in mutual charity and piety; which he always repeats, for every conflict within Christian peoples, and in every writing and discourse of his, in every counsel to priests and preachers. He himself composed touching prayers for the cessation of the war, for the reunion of the Churches of the East, to invoke God's help on the peace congress, for the end of civil strife, for the propagation of the faith. He extended to the whole Church the use of three Masses on the day of the dead (1915) and the feast of the Holy Family, restored with the Code the precept for St. Joseph and Corpus Christi; approved the office of the Eucharistic Heart of Jesus. Manifold provisions he directed to increasing the fervor of religious life. The encyclicals on the centenaries of St. Dominic, of St. Francis, of Dante attest to this; the briefs, letters, acts for the increase of Eucharistic worship, for the domestic reading of the Gospels, the intronization of the Sacred Heart, the devotion of the Most Precious Blood; for the Rosary, the Sorrowful Mother, the Queen of peace, the Madonna of Loreto; for St. Joseph and the fiftieth-anniversary celebration of his universal patriarchate; for the feasts of the archangels; for the canonizations of St. Joan of Arc, of St. Gabriel of the Sorrowful Mother, of St. Margaret Alacoque (1920); the beatifications of Giuseppe Cottolengo and of Anna of St. Bartholomew (1917), of Anna Maria Taigi, Louise de Marillac, Oliver Plunket, of the 22 Martyrs of Uganda and of the Ursulines of Valenciennes (1920); for the proclamation of St. Ephrem as doctor; for all that treasure of pious wisdom which he celebrated at every jubilee celebration as for St. Jerome, St. Alphonsus, St. John Berchmans and Blessed Canisius, at every introduction of causes and proclamation of heroic virtues of other luminaries of religion. Tireless zeal for the Catholic missions he manifested in the encyclical Maximum illud and with the erection of colleges in Rome, in Italy, in Switzerland and in Germany, with the protection of the Pious Missionary Union of the Clergy, with the preparation for the third centenary of Propaganda Fide, with the subsidies lavished on all missionaries; while of the ardent desire to recall the separated brethren to Mother Church and of the predilection for the united Churches of the East, proof is the autonomy given to the appropriate Congregation and the institution of a Pontifical Institute over which he wished to "watch personally."

In harmony with pontifical traditions is his zeal for cultural and social progress, in which he recognized the fertile ground for civil rebirth. As far as the universal crisis and the brief pontificate allowed, he was a munificent protector of science and art. This is shown to us by the foundation of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan (1920), the munificent contribution to the reconstruction of the library of Louvain (1918), the expansion of the School of Sacred Music in Rome (1915), the erection of the Petriano Museum (1917), the enlargement of the Egyptian Museum (1915), the foundation of the Astrophotographic Cabinet at the Vatican Observatory, and, in the Apostolic Palace, the restoration of the Tapestry Workshop (1915), the extensive protection given to that of the mosaics, the restoration and decoration of the Ducal Hall (1917), the new seat of the administration (1917), the new quarters of the Noble Guard (1922), the statue of Our Lady of Peace in St. Mary Major (1918), the donation for the Franciscan church of Ravenna (1921), the favor and aid granted to artists, especially the young, to works of art and schools of every country. In the complex and agitated social field he may be called a continuer of the thought of Leo XIII, whose doctrines he confirmed whenever the great problems of economic justice touched the magisterium of the Church. In the acute crisis after the war, his diagnosis of the threatening malady is sure, as is his remedy radical. For pacification, for equilibrium, for social order, justice and equity are not enough "unless there comes about in minds and hearts the rebirth of those principles that made the world Christian from pagan," that is, with the victory over the passions. These are unleashed "by the boundless love of wealth and the insatiable thirst for pleasures, so that while on the one hand accumulated treasures never suffice, on the other it is not a spirit of resignation, but envy, which is impotent hatred and at the same time expectation of revenge." It is therefore necessary to start from an "individual reform" which is "an instrument for bringing into the bosom of society a breath of Christian life." It flourishes from the spirit made simple again, from that "spiritual childhood for which love is joyousness, is like the need for joy of little children," it opens the ways of the True and makes it desirable for oneself and for others. Whence the social love of neighbor. In fact "the people is reconquered with an action bringing truth and charity which can neutralize the contrary activity informed by hatred and lies." To deviate from this norm, to let love degenerate into conflicts and violence even in the name of just claims, is a betrayal of the civil order itself, which is harmony, concord, class collaboration; the fruit of that relationship between duties and rights, whereby only the observance of the one legitimizes the assertion of the other. And when bloody conflicts broke out, determining new fratricidal struggles, the Pope summed up all the wisdom of this doctrine of Christian love in a famous prayer of his with which he implored from God for men, that they might know how to repeat the Pater Noster, remembering that they constitute a single family and disposing themselves to have their debts forgiven as each of them forgave his own debtors.

This biographical sketch cannot close, if it is not to remain incomplete, without casting a glance at what particularly concerns Italy, where the work of the Holy See, if it has always had singular repercussions, had most special ones with B. XV both because of its importance and because of the peculiarities of the moment. The "Roman question" being always open, to which the Pontiff, like his predecessors, had referred by explicitly renewing the traditional protests, he nevertheless found its primary political asperities overcome by the provisions of Pius X, who, having in fact removed the non expedit and claiming the freedom and independence of the Holy See without temporalist preconditions, had induced the currents of Catholics divergent on the matter to concord, and all political sectors to a more serene judgment. If not that the great war, like that of 1911 for the Italian conquest in Libya, had demonstrated the necessity of a solution. The episode of the occupation of Palazzo Venezia (1916) by the Italian State, which considered the seat of an embassy to the Vatican a war pledge, and, before that, the exodus to Lugano of the diplomatic representatives to the Pope of the Powers at war with Italy (1915), were but the two most significant symptoms of the complications that the situation, already unsustainable in peace, was creating, in too many respects, during a war of such proportions. It suffices to think of the relations of the central government of the Church, seated in the capital of a belligerent State, with nations hostile to it, and of the Pope's own magisterium for the moralization of the war and for the work of peace, accused now and again, according to the opposing criticisms of the parties in conflict, of partiality or of hostility toward Italy and its allies. B. XV, while not ceasing to seize from events the opportunity to call the attention of Italy and the world to the irrefutable claims of the Holy See, nevertheless did so by reaffirming the possibility and the confidence of resolving understandings, and even attenuating, in favor of a more prompt advent of international peace, any new emergence of the dissension between the papacy and Italy. Cardinal Gasparri, Secretary of State, in an interview granted to the Corriere d'Italia on June 28, 1915, declaring himself the interpreter of the Pontiff's thought, affirmed that the Holy See awaited "the arrangement suited to its situation not from foreign arms but from the triumph of those sentiments of justice which it hopes will spread ever more in the Italian people in conformity with its true interest." The impression of these affirmations was all the more vivid in that it was known that Germany and Austria, if victorious, would have brought to the peace Conference the solution of the "Roman question," and that the Italian Government itself, fearing influences in this direction, was decidedly hostile to any intervention by the Pope for the pacification of the world, to which Benedict XV devoted his every purpose and labor. This impression explains how, during the Versailles Conference, Msgr. Cerretti, secretary of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, was able in Paris to submit to the President of the Council and head of the Italian mission to the conference itself a plan for the resolution of the conflict between the State and the Holy See in Italy, and how the Hon. V. E. Orlando had accepted it (1919). It explains how the plan, cut short by the resignation of the Cabinet, was taken up again by the new head of government F. Nitti (who had already had occasion to exchange ideas on the matter with high prelates) and through direct negotiations with Card. Gasparri (1920); it explains finally how it was possible, on the other hand, for a party of Italian Catholics and its strong group of deputies in Parliament to arise and become firmly established in 1920, without reservations on the Pope's part. Indeed, speaking at the meeting of the Diocesan Councils of Italy in 1919, he distinguished Catholic Action, which he had reorganized and united as early as 1915, from the "actions of Catholics" in the economic and political field, as being lawful, commendable, bound to draw inspiration from the supreme principles of religion, of morality, of Catholic social teaching, but proper to the responsibilities of citizens without involving those of the Holy See and of the Church. Finally, he explicitly removed the prohibition in force since 1870 barring Catholic sovereigns from coming to Rome, so that nothing could be imputed to the Holy See as an obstacle or difficulty to contacts and understandings among States after the crisis of war, in the interest of peace and the harmonious cooperation of peoples. This was another non expedit of international scope. In abolishing it, Benedict XV, with regard to the access of Heads of State to Rome, could have repeated verbatim the words with which Pius X in the Fermo Proposito justified the suspension of the non expedit for the access of Italian Catholics to the polls. If the prohibition was in force for most grave reasons, for reasons "no less grave" and "drawn from the supreme good of societies," this one, like that veto, was removed by the Pope.

Hence the unanimous recognition of so long-suffering and beneficent a work by the Pope on the part of Italians of every persuasion is entirely understandable, when his earthly labor closed to leave at last to history its serene, definitive judgment.

He fell ill with influenzal bronchitis on Jan. 18, 1922. His weak constitution did not hold out. He died on the 22nd, offering his life for peace. He had reigned seven years, four months and twenty days. His immense work, the target of unjust criticisms, of poisonous attacks, of sectarian hatreds, was already gathering the fruits of an equitable, universal, admired esteem. Proof of this was the fact that he left 27 States represented at the Holy See, among them France (1920), which had broken off its relations with the Vatican in the time of Combes; Portugal (1918), which had had none since the proclamation of the Republic; England (1915), which before 1870 had had only a consular representation, and afterwards none at all; and China, which had never had one. The worldwide mourning that greeted his death fully confirmed this growing testimony of moral and political consideration. In every country, on the part of every religious faith, even non-Christian, not excluding Jews and Muslims, from every political current, even the most extreme, including communists and anarchists, there arose a plebiscite of which a most noble echo was heard from the parliamentary benches, from diplomacy, from the government benches, among Heads of State, with unanimous homage to his genius, to his impartiality, to his love for truth, for justice, for the brotherhood of peoples, for compassion for their misfortunes. Of the good that came to civilization from it, nothing is more significant than the literal quotation of the "Note to the Heads of State" made by the president of the Assembly of the League of Nations, Giuseppe Motta, on Oct. 3, 1924, asserting that "if humanity shall one day, perhaps still far off, succeed in abolishing war, it is to the system of arbitration, as proposed by Benedict XV, that it will owe this conquest of incomparable value." Of the prestige that Rome gained from it, the historian L. von Pastor said the same year: "Benedict XV, the most skillful diplomat, was perhaps the only one who could master the grave situations of the world war. He guided the barque of Peter with such assurance through the stormy seas that swallowed three empires, that at his death the prestige of the Holy See was increased among all nations. This came about in large part also through the merit of the grandiose work of charity that he directed in favor of the peoples of Europe so gravely stricken." As a crown to such testimonies, that of Pius XI, who in his first consistorial allocution affirmed that his predecessor "governed the Church in such a way as to win not only the praise of Catholics, but also the admiration of adversaries. While men struggled among themselves in hatred, never ceasing to inculcate peace, he filled the world with the benefits of his charity. His memory therefore will remain in blessing."

During his pontificate Benedict XV promoted to the episcopate his two successors: Achille Ratti on June 6, 1919, sending him afterwards as apostolic visitor and then nuncio to Poland and finally conferring on him the sacred purple; and Eugenio Pacelli on Apr. 23, 1917, consecrating him with his own hands on May 13 and sending him as nuncio to Bavaria and then to Germany. He created 32 cardinals, 8 archiepiscopal sees, 26 episcopal sees, 3 abbeys and nullius prelatures, 2 apostolic delegations: in Albania and in Japan, 28 apostolic vicariates, 8 apostolic prefectures.

In his iconography the foremost place is held by the so-called portrait of Einsiedeln, painted by Giorgio Szoldatich, the aforementioned statue of Constantinople sculpted by Pietro Canonica, to whom is also due the sepulchral monument in St. Peter's in the chapel of the Presentation, and the high bronze relief by Carlo Barberis, on the tomb in the Vatican grottoes.

Giuseppe Dalla Torre