The Sorrowful Mother Stood Weeping: Catholic Women and Total War in Central Europe, 1914–62

Religious histories of the world wars have marginalized female religious believers to an unjustifiable extent. Lost in the sound and fury of clerical nationalism, the top-down voices of prominent clergy, especially the bishops, have dominated the discourse. Recent work on the Great War in particular has helped to reconsider stereotypical romanticized notions of homefront/battlefront as well as public and private spheres regarding gender, and to a lesser extent, gender and religion.

This paper focuses on Catholic women from the losing powers, re-theorizing the era of the world wars as a moment when Catholic women gained considerable agency, drew on their religious traditions, and adapted their religious lives to the shattering circumstances of total war. With comparative and transnational methodology building on a globalized German and Central European history, this research draws on extensive archival sources from ecclesiastical, state, federal, and local archives in order to represent lived religion as closely as possible in the mindscapes of religious believers. Key topics include: nursing care, religious education, debates about sexuality, and rebuilding of family and nation in the aftermath of catastrophic defeat. Problematizing Catholic religion in particular as stereotypically “feminine,” the paper argues that standard narratives of the world wars for the losing powers do not fit the conventional frameworks of a Catholic story of the twentieth century.