As the centenary of the First World War unfolds, it is very encouraging to see the literature on the religious experience and legacy of the war (so long a strikingly neglected subject) grow apace. For Anglophone readers, it is particularly welcome to see the appearance of this ambitious and pioneering transnational study of Catholicism in Austria-Hungary and Germany, a study whose central thesis is that the war (so long rued as a religious catastrophe by liberal Protestants in the English-speaking world) was in no sense a radically secularising experience for central European Catholics, even those who were loyal subjects of two of the war's losing powers. Focusing mainly on ‘lived religion’ (p. 1), and wisely allowing its subjects to ‘speak in their own voices as much as possible’ (p. 16), Houlihan argues that ‘Specifically Catholic forms of belief and practice allowed Catholics in the losing powers to cope with the war's devastation remarkably better than standard cultural histories of secularization and literary modernism would have us believe’ (p. 1). Not only this, but such were the inherent strengths of traditional Catholic theology and devotional life that Catholicism ‘provided an extra measure of comfort beyond Protestantism during the Great War’ (p. 11). In presenting these arguments, Houlihan stresses what he sees as the neglected ‘Catholic dimension’ of the First World War, rightly pointing out that more than half of all Europeans were at least nominally Catholic, including nearly 80 per cent of the Habsburgs’ subjects and more than a third of all Germans. In the course of seven well-researched chapters, Houlihan sketches the pre-war situation of Catholicism in Austria-Hungary and Germany; the underlying continuity of Catholic theology; the performance of Catholic chaplains; the devotional lives of Catholic soldiers; religious practice on the home front (focusing especially on women and children); the activities of the papacy and their practical and long-term ramifications; and, finally, the capacity of traditional Catholicism to absorb the shock of mass bereavement, mourning, defeat and political upheaval.

While there are clear (and convincing) echoes of Annette Becker's War and faith: the religious imagination in France, 1914–1930 (1998) in Houlihan's argument for the vitality and resilience of Catholic belief and practice in the cauldron of the First World War, he is on shakier ground in his admittedly bold claim as to their inherent advantages over their Protestant equivalents, especially given the enormous breadth of Protestantism and the absence of any systematic and sustained comparison (what, one wonders, might a study of Hungarian Calvinism reveal?). Furthermore, there is a tendency to stumble over religious and devotional terminology. Jan Hus, for example, was not exactly a ‘Protestant’ (p. 249), and (the claims of the Protestant Truth Society notwithstanding) Catholics do not ‘worship’ the Virgin Mary (pp. 137, 139), and still less would a Catholic soldier pray ‘to his rosary’ (p. 68). It is also rather perplexing to read that ‘Any item with a personal connection to the dearly departed became a religious relic for believing Catholic families’ (p. 226). Nevertheless, in overall terms these are minor infelicities in an important book that does much to illuminate the religious dimensions of the First World War, and which will no doubt prove to be the catalyst for much further research on the religious experience of the First World War in Central Europe.