I've been reading the encyclicals of Pope Pius XI. He reigned from February 1922 to February 1939 between the two world wars. It was a time of both moral and political upheaval. In his book, Vicars of Christ, Charles Coulombe describes the problems faced by the new pope who was elected on the 14th ballot of the conclave:[Pope Pius XI] faced a number of enormous problems brought about by the course of World War I; for the first time since Constantine, there were no Christian emperors -- indeed, there was no great power at all with a professedly Christian outlook. Moreover, Russia was actively exporting revolution....the defeat of Greece by Turkey in 1922 resulted in virtually the entire Armenian and Greek population of Asia Minor being driven out of Asia Minor (or killed). Thus, for the first time since St. Paul of Tarsus, a region once as Christian as Italy or Spain was almost totally bereft of the faithful....The construction of a power vacuum by the destruction of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the creation of the Weimar Republic boded badly for continued peace in Europe. The intial replacement of the "autocratic" Central European regimes with poorly established "democratic ones" would indeed be followed up by true totalitarian ones."
