Special liturgy atones for outbreak of Great War

Half a world away from Europe, where World War I erupted 100 years ago on July 28, Washington National Cathedral marked the occasion with a liturgy created especially for the anniversary.

But the service was about more than remembrance. It was about atonement—atonement for the 16 million killed in the conflict and the more than 20 million wounded, many of them horribly disfigured in trench warfare that kept much of the four-year conflict at a stalemate.

“I was struggling with praying for the beginning of a war,” said Gina Campbell, the Washington, D.C., cathedral’s canon precentor and the author of the World War I liturgy. “I was trying to put my mind around how one prays for the beginning of a war. I thought it would need to be profoundly penitential, that the way one would approach the disaster that is World War I would have to be in deep penitence.”