Reply of the Austrian Emperor to Pope Benedict XV

by Emperor Charles I

Holy Father: With due veneration and deep emotion we take cognizance of the new representations which your Holiness, in fulfillment of the holy office intrusted to you by God, makes to us and the heads of the other belligerent States, with the noble intention of leading the heavily tried nations to a unity that will restore peace to them.

With a thankful heart we receive this fresh gift of fatherly care which you, Holy Father, always bestow on all peoples without distinction, and from the depth of our heart we greet the moving exhortation which your Holiness has addressed to the Governments of the belligerent peoples.

During this cruel war we have always looked up to your Holiness as to the highest personage, who, in virtue of his mission, which reaches beyond earthly things, and, thanks to the high conception of his duties laid upon him, stands high above the belligerent peoples, and who, inaccessible to all influence, was able to find a way which may lead to the realization of our own desire for peace, lasting and honorable for all parties.

Since ascending the throne of our ancestors, and fully conscious of the responsibility which we bear before God and men for the fate of the Austin-Hungarian Monarchy, we have never lost sight of the high aim of restoring to our peoples, as speedily an possible, the blessings of peace. Soon after our accession to the throne it was vouchsafed to us, in common with our allies, to undertake a step which bad been considered and prepared by our exalted predecessor, Francis Joseph, to pave the way for a lasting and honorable peace.

We gave expression to this desire in a speech from the throne delivered at the opening of the Austrian Reichetag, thereby showing that we are striving after a peace that shall free the future life of the nation from rancor and a thirst for revenge, and that shall secure them for generations to come from the employment of armed forces. Our joint government has in the meantime not failed in repeated and emphatic declarations, which could be heard by all the world, to give expression to our own will and that of the Austro-Hungarian peoples to prepare an end to bloodshed by a peace such as your Holiness has in mind.

Happy in the thought that our desires from the first were directed toward the same object which your Holiness today characterizes as one we should strive for, we have taken into close consideration the concrete and practical suggestion of your Holinesss and have come to the following conclusions:

With deep-rooted conviction we agree to the leading idea of your Holiness that the future arrangement of the world must be based on the elimination of armed forces and on the moral force of right and on the rule of international justice and legality.

We, too, are imbued with the hope that a strengthening of the sense of right would morally regenerate humanity. We support, therefore, your Holiness' view that the negotiations between the belligerents should and could lead to an understanding by which, with the creation of appropriate guarantees, armaments on land and sea and in the air might be reduced simultaneously, reciprocally and gradually to a fixed limit, and whereby the high seas, which rightly belong to all the nations of the earth, may be freed from domination or paramountcy, and be opened equally for the use of all.

Fully conscious of the importance of the promotion of peace on the method proposed by your Holiness, namely, to submit international disputes to compulsory arbitration, we are also prepared to enter into negotiations regarding this proposal.

If, as we most heartily desire, agreements should be arrived at between the belligerents which would realize this sublime idea and thereby give security to the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy for its unhampered future development, it can then not be difficult to find a satisfactory solution of the other questions which still remain to be settled between the belligerents in a spirit of justice, and of a reasonable consideration of the conditions for existence of both parties.

If the nations of the earth were to enter, with a desirable peace, into negotiations with one another in the sense of your Holiness' proposals, then peace could blossom forth from them. The nations could attain complete freedom of movement on the high seas, heavy material burdens could be taken from them, and now sources of prosperity opened to them,.

Guided by a spirit of moderation and conciliation, we see in the proposals of your Holiness a suitable basis for initiating negotiations with a view to preparing a peace, just to all and lasting, and we earnestly hope our present enemies may be animated by the same ideas. In this spirit we beg that the Almighty may bless the work of peace begun by your Holiness.

See also Emperor Charles I: World War I Peace Campaigner and To the Heads of the Belligerent Peoples (Benedict XI)

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