In World War I, men were killed at a greater rate and with greater ferocity for less evident reward than at any other time in history. US entry in 1917 was “decisive” not in ending this war but in postponing the fighting for two decades until the next one.

Since religion claims to give meaning to people's lives, the Great War gave religious institutions an unprecedented opportunity to show their relevance. The institution that interests Patrick Houlihan is Catholicism, which counted nominal believers among majorities of Hungarians, Austrians, Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Croats, Slovenes, and South Germans. Houlihan counters the widespread belief that the war promoted only secularization and doubt, and argues that Catholicism, as a lived faith, carried on with impressive continuity in belief and ritual, helping combatants and noncombatants cope with the cataclysm that had descended upon them. He writes that Catholicism more effectively addressed the trauma of war than did Protestantism, because the church's arsenal of intercessory saint culture, tangibility of devotional objects, and a “universal” community that went beyond the nation provided greater comfort than justification “by individual faith alone” (11).

Houlihan documents Catholicism's success through reference to continued high participation in Catholic sacramental life and lower rates of people leaving the church after the war. He also recovers “everyday mentalities” (121) of parishioners and clerics to show that Catholics made sense of the suffering through ideas about God's plans for humanity. For many, “war was another cyclical plague, redolent of the sinful human condition,” and losses signaled a need to atone (48). “God lets the war continue,” the bishop of St. Pölten preached in 1916, “because it is a great means for the fulfillment of his plans in the education of humanity” (58).

If Houlihan's absorbing account, based on careful reading of voluminous primary and secondary sources, makes a strong case for Catholicism's ability to survive political upheaval, it also makes the church seem like one of war's enablers, encouraging men to serve loyally, rosaries and scripture in their pockets, and kill other men with rosaries and scripture in their pockets. Catholics had no choice but to bow to war's horrors; as Vienna's Catholic daily Reichspost wrote in July 1914, “as long as there are human beings there will be wars” (240).

Perhaps the church would have better served Christian purposes by generating more doubt; yet, because Houlihan has not surveyed non-Catholic sources, we do not know if Catholics were more willing than other young men to perform their duties. As a voice crying out the contradiction between Gospel and mass slaughter, we are left with Benedict XV and his peace initiatives and prayers, which Houlihan says impressed ordinary believers. He also records the exasperation of a Jesuit chaplain who asked decades later whether he had not nourished “glowing hatred in the hearts of men” (218).

In my view the war did more to transform Catholicism than Houlihan credits. Beneath the continuity in practice among masses of believers, we also register longings for radical reorientation, and paradoxically, for return to genuine forms of worship. In 1926, theologian Engelbert Krebs told a packed church in Freiburg that “no generation in history has had to taste more painfully than ours the dubiousness of earthbound existence or the curse of the unredeemed quality of our world.” There was something new in the cycle of grief generated by this war that called for tapping the “mysterious streams of energy of the Christian church beyond our time's landscape of ruins….”

The institutional church pledged loyalty to the postwar republics, but as such words suggest, Catholic thinkers felt ambivalent about democracy. As early as 1920, the publisher Carl Muth, whom Houlihan cites as proponent of a Catholic “third way” (256), was calling for a corporatist organization of society. This can be seen as proto-Fascist, but the Catholic reform movement also had other implications. Muth later served as a mentor to Hans Scholl, and the liturgical innovations fostered in Weimar Germany were forerunners of the more open church of Vatican II.

Given the ambiguous relation of politics and religion, Houlihan's insistence on the staying power of the Catholic milieu is compelling and important. Had he looked at records from World War II, he would have found similar accommodation and continuity at the level of popular piety. What ultimately transformed the Catholic Lebenswelt was not brutal and costly war, but the great cultural turn of the 1960s, something critics call the “postconciliar crisis.”