Editing Pope Benedict XV (section)

=== Humanitarian efforts ===

[[File:Pio1917.jpg|thumb|right|230px| Nuncio [[Eugenio Pacelli]] delivers packages from Benedict XV to Italian POWs in 1917.]] Almost from the beginning of the war, November 1914, Benedict negotiated with the warring parties about an exchange of wounded and other prisoners of war who were unable to continue fighting. Tens of thousands of such prisoners were exchanged through his intervention.<ref name="Gröber 495" /> On 15 January 1915, he proposed an exchange of civilians from the occupied zones, which resulted in 20,000 persons being sent to unoccupied Southern France in one month.<ref name="Gröber 495" /> In 1916, Benedict managed to hammer out an agreement between both sides by which 29,000 prisoners with lung disease from the [[Chemical weapons in World War I|gas attacks]] could be sent into Switzerland.<ref>Pollard 114</ref> In May 1918, he also negotiated an agreement whereby prisoners on both sides with at least 18 months of captivity and four children at home would also be sent to neutral Switzerland.<ref name="Gröber 495" />

He succeeded in 1915 in reaching an agreement by which the warring parties promised not to let prisoners of war (POWs) work on Sundays and [[Religious holiday|holidays]]. Several individuals on both sides were spared the death penalty after his intervention. [[Hostage]]s were exchanged and corpses repatriated.<ref name="Gröber 495" /> The Pope founded the ''Opera dei Prigionieri'' to assist in distributing information on prisoners. By the end of the war, some 600,000 items of correspondence were processed by the Vatican. Almost a third of it concerned missing persons. Some 40,000 people had asked for help in the repatriation of sick POWs and 50,000 letters were sent from families to their loved ones who were POWs.<ref>Pollard 113</ref>

Both during and after the war, Benedict was primarily concerned about the fate of the children, on whose behalf he issued an encyclical. In 1916 he appealed to the people and clergy of the United States to help him feed the starving children in German-occupied Belgium. His aid to children was not limited to Belgium but extended to children in Lithuania, Poland, Lebanon, Montenegro, Syria and Russia.<ref>Pollard 115</ref> Benedict was particularly appalled at the new military invention of aerial warfare and protested several times against it to no avail.<ref name="Pollard 116">Pollard 116</ref>

In May and June 1915, the [[Ottoman Empire]] waged a [[Armenian genocide|genocide against the Armenian Christian minorities]] in [[Anatolia]]. The Vatican attempted to get Germany and Austria-Hungary involved in protesting to its Turkish ally. The Pope himself sent a personal letter to Sultan [[Mehmed V]], who was also [[Caliph]] of Islam. It had no success "as over a million Armenians died, either killed outright by the Turks or from maltreatment or starvation".<ref name="Pollard 116" />