The Long Shadow of Pius XI, One Hundred Years Later, by Michael Pakaluk

One of the very best histories of World War I, The Long Shadow, by Cambridge historian David Reynolds (both a book and a BBC documentary series), deals not so much with the causes of that terrible war as with how the conflict would shape the world over the next century. Reynolds, of course, has the historian’s advantage of looking back.

But Catholics, if they wish, can consult a very different guide, a papal encyclical written in the aftermath of the war, which diagnosed how things stood then and presciently warned about even greater calamities which were to come unless a certain definite remedy was adopted.

I mean the first encyclical of then newly-elected Pope Pius XI, called Ubi arcano Dei consilio, published on December 23, 1922, exactly 100 years ago today. …

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