Germany's Catholic bishops have acknowledged that the Churches share responsibility for “war-mongering” in the build up to the First World War and warned against “inflated nationalism” and “destructive self-interest”.
The Berlin-based bishops' conference said in a statement the dimensions of the conflict that left 16 million dead and 21 million wounded were “still shocking”.
The bishops said that before the war began in 1914, national rivalries trumped the close economic ties between countries, unleashing a conflict of "previously unimaginable proportions," in which poison gas and other weapons of mass destruction were used.
It added that Europe's Christian Churches had also played their part in "war-mongering" at the outbreak of fighting.
"Although the Catholic Church had distanced itself from nineteenth-century nationalism by virtue of its universal character, many bishops, priests and faithful took the side of those welcoming the war as a chance for spiritual and moral renewal," they said.
"We know today that many people, including those high up in the Church, brought guilt upon themselves, failing in the national blindness to perceive the suffering of the war's victims, and realising too late the consequences of absolute loyalty to their respective nations."
Nationalism, if taken to extremes, still posed a threat to peace today, the bishops added. "As a Church, present throughout the world with a redemptive message for all humanity, we must be determined in opposing all inflated nationalism and every attempt to devalue peoples and cultures. Our times demand an effective response in asserting the common interests of the human family against destructive self-interest," they said.
In a set of prayers for use at remembrance Masses for the First World War, they described the conflict as "a memorial to overpowering guilt and failure, blindness and idolatry".
At the start of the conflict the popular and influential Lutheran theologian Adolf von Harnack signed a public statement supporting Germany’s war aims. In a lecture in London earlier this year, the former archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Williams, said Lutheranism had not been immune from ideas of a German moral superiority boosted by a musical and literary flourishing.
In their statement the bishops paid tribute to Catholic priests and military chaplains who worked for peace and reconciliation, and to Pope Benedict XV, who "repeatedly urged" the warring parties to go to the negotiating table rather than take up arms.
The First World War began on 28 July, 1914, when the first shots were fired during an Austro-Hungarian invasion of Serbia, and Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August after Kaiser Wilhelm’s troops had invaded neutral Belgium.
The start of centenary commemorations will include a meeting of European heads of state at the battlefield of Ypres, Belgium.
Among various church services marking the centenary in Britain, the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Vincent Nichols, will celebrate a Requiem Mass for the Fallen of the First World War on Monday. He is also due to attend a vigil at Westminster Abbey at 10pm on Monday that will be broadcast live on BBC2.
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