Pope and Politician in Parallel: The Notion of War and Peace at the Formation of Italian Christian Democracy

This article examines the conceptual convergence between papal teaching and early Christian democratic political thought on the question of war and peace, focusing on Pope Benedict XV and Luigi Sturzo. While Christian democracy is commonly analyzed through the lens of Catholic social doctrine in areas such as social policy and political organization, its underlying assumptions concerning war, peace and international order remain underexplored. The study reconstructs Benedict XV’s wartime and postwar peace teaching, highlighting his moral critique of war, his emphasis on prevention, and his advocacy of juridical and institutional mechanisms such as arbitration, disarmament, and international cooperation. These positions are then compared with Sturzo’s political and theoretical reflections, which stress the subordination of politics to moral norms, skepticism toward nationalism and statism, and support for supranational institutions as safeguards of peace. The article situates this convergence within the broader historical transformation of the papacy’s relationship to democratic politics, particularly the dismantling of the non expedit principle and the emergence of Italian Christian democracy. It argues that both figures integrate ethical normativity with realism, offering an alternative to power-centered approaches in international relations and anticipating later “just peace” paradigms in Catholic social thought.