President Wilson Introduces His “Fourteen Points” for Peace to Congress: January 8, 1918
- Catholic Textbook Project
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This text comes from our book, The American Venture.
The Pope’s Peace Efforts
When the Great War broke out in 1914, Pius X had been the reigning pope for over a decade. Rejecting the decision for war, Pius died, calling on the powers to abandon their “murderous struggle” and seek peace. The war was only a month old when Pius’ successor, Pope Benedict XV, took up the call for peace. On the Feast of All Souls, November 1, 1914, Benedict issued Ad Beatissimi, an encyclical letter in which he declared that war violates the union God wishes for mankind in the Communion of Saints.
Throughout the war, Pope Benedict never ceased working for peace. He carried on peace efforts with both sides, to get them to agree on the terms of peace. With the appointment in April 1917 of Archbishop Eugenio Pacelli as his apostolic nuncio in Germany, the pope could open negotiations with the German government. When in July he learned through Pacelli that the German chancellor was willing to discuss peace, Pope Benedict issued to the leaders of the warring powers a peace proposal, laid out in seven points.
In his seven points, Benedict said justice, not power based on the “material force of arms,” should decide disputes between nations. Nations, moreover, should, he said, reduce the size of their military arsenals. Instead of relying on war to settle international disputes, nations should establish an “institution of arbitration” to decide international questions. This institution should have the power, said Benedict, to level sanctions against a state that refused to submit international questions to it for arbitration, or which refused to accept its decisions.
The pope’s seven points called for granting all nations “true liberty and common rights over the sea.” The warring nations, he said, should all renounce the demand for war indemnities for the damages and cost of the war: “the continuation of such carnage solely for economic reasons would be inconceivable,” he said. All occupied territories, said Benedict, should be evacuated and restored to their nations. When two warring nations claimed the same territory, the pope urged them to examine each other’s claims and consult the desires and aspirations of the people who actually lived in the disputed territories.
The reception of the pope’s seven points by Allied leaders was disappointing. The British government said that it did not trust Germany and so would not agree to any peace initiatives. France wanted to discourage any further attempts by the papal court to interfere between the warring powers. France, whose government had no delegation at the Vatican, asked Britain “to discourage any further attempt on the part of the papal secretary of state in the direction of an official intervention between the belligerents.”
“What does he want to butt in for?” was reportedly what President Wilson said when he received the pope’s seven points. In his reply to Benedict, signed by Secretary of State Lansing, Wilson expressed his doubts that the pope’s plan could secure the desired peace. The test of any peace proposal, said Wilson, should be whether “it is based upon the faith of all the peoples involved or merely upon the word of an ambitious and intriguing government on the one hand and of a group of free peoples on the other.” Since the United States could not “take the word of the present rulers of Germany as a guaranty of anything that is to endure,” Wilson said he could not accept the pope’s peace plan.
Though the Kaiser, it seems, was enthusiastic about the pope’s proposals for peace, the official reply sent by his chancellor did not mention the all-important question of what would happen to Belgium, which Germany had invaded and occupied at the beginning of the war. Urged by Archbishop Pacelli to clarify the government’s position on Belgium, the chancellor replied that he was in agreement with the Holy See’s peace efforts and that all questions connected with Belgium should be the first items of negotiation.
The peace negotiations, however, went no further. Despite the pope’s efforts, the bloody war continued.
Fourteen Points for Peace
What “we demand in this war . . . is nothing peculiar to ourselves. It is that the world be made fit and safer to live in; and particularly that it be made safe for every peace-loving nation which, like our own, wishes to live its own life, determine its own institutions, be assured of justice and fair dealing by other peoples of the world as against force and selfish aggression.”
With these words, President Wilson introduced his own peace plan—the “Fourteen Points”—to Congress on January 8, 1918. The president’s proposal was in line with his earlier stated goals in the war—to convince both sides to come to an amicable peace and to promote democracy. Ironically, Wilson’s Fourteen Points were very similar to Pope Benedict’s seven points, which the president had rejected a little over four months earlier. For instance, both proposals called for a decrease of armaments on both sides. Both wanted to see the formation of an international institution that would adjudicate disputes between nations and assure justice between countries—what Wilson called a “league of nations.” Both pope and president called for freedom and community of the seas.
Wilson’s Fourteen Points and Benedict’s Seven Points, however, differed in important ways. The pope’s plan did not seek to break up existing multinational political groups such as Austria-Hungary, which was made up of many national groups: Germans, Magyars, Slavs, and Romanians. Wilson, however, called for the breaking up of such political groups into smaller nations based on nationality and language. Not only would, for instance, the Austrian-Hungarian Empire be divided into an Austrian nation and a Hungarian nation, it would be further divided into German, Hungarian, and Slavic states.
Such a policy, of course, worried Emperor Karl who, in 1916, had succeeded his uncle, Franz Josef as emperor of Austria and king of Hungary. It would seem that Wilson would have warmed to Karl, for (devout Catholic that he was), he had been active in seeking peace with the Allies, even promising to give over some Austrian territory to Italy in exchange for peace. (Italy, though originally allied with Germany and Austria-Hungary, had gone over to the Entente early in the war, in part, to win some Italian-speaking regions in the Austrian Tirol.) Yet, Wilson would have nothing to do with the emperor—after all, Karl was not a leader elected by the people! When in February 1918 Karl requested that Wilson clarify what he meant by “self-determination for the peoples of Austria-Hungary,” the president refused to negotiate with him.
