Pope Francis and Pope Benedict XVI have urged Catholics to read the 1907 book by Mgr Robert Hugh Benson entitled Lord of the World with its dire predictions on the world and the Church. It is, indeed, a reflection of our times.
Robert was the youngest son of Edward White Benson, Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury. Like his father, he was earmarked for the Anglican Church with high prospects of an elevated position therein. He was ordained a priest in the Anglican Church by his father in 1895. However, after his father’s death he went through a long crisis of faith as a result of which he converted to Catholicism and was received into the Church on September 11, 1903. He was ordained a Catholic priest in 1904.
Benson was, like his two brothers, a prolific writer in various subjects. After his conversion, he was appointed a supernumerary private chamberlain to the saintly Pope Pius X in 1911 and styled as monsignor. Benson, thereafter, became a cognoscente of the workings of the Vatican which he expertly exhibits in detail in Lord of the World.
He died in 1914 at the age of 42 of pneumonia. Much was expected of him, but, very unfortunately, he died too young. Benson’s book is dystopian literature at its peak. In it he displays remarkable prescience. Years before World War I he accurately predicted passenger air travel, interstate highways, weapons of mass destruction, the use of aircraft to drop bombs on military and civilian targets.
The novel tells a story that supposedly happens at the beginning of the 21st century amid great political tensions in the world and considerable erosions in all religions. An unknown senator from Vermont named Julian Felsenburgh manages to broker an impossible peace within Asia’s rival factions and then with Europe and a great world war is thus avoided.
Thereafter, the young senator gains an almost messianic role. Enthusiasm for him is everywhere - in Rome, Paris, Berlin and London. He speaks 15 languages but normally uses Esperanto. The zeal for him is everywhere.
In London he is received by wild crowds gathered in Paul’s House (meaning St Paul’s Cathedral). It is bitter irony that the famous Christian Cathedral (named after St Paul who extended Christianity beyond the Jewish context and whose epistles formed the basis of subsequent Christian theology) is the venue for his most important meeting with his followers in Great Britain.
Felsenburgh is none other than the long prophesised Anti-Christ – a world-dominant personage regarded since the first Christians as the embodiment of all that is evil. Felsenburgh is soon voted by the European parliaments as the President of Europe with supreme powers conferred upon him. Felsenburgh was to “assume a position hitherto undreamed of in democracy”.
What we are seeing today does not necessarily indicate that the end of the world is nigh, but Mgr Benson’s book certainly does give us a feeling of déjà vu
Under his influence evil apes good. Benson describes the perverse situation created by Felsenburgh as “Catholicism without Christianity”. He exploits traditional goodness and virtue to achieve his evil intentions.
Euthanasia becomes an act of compassion and “ministers of euthanasia” are real priests regarded as “angels of mercy”. Ex-Catholic priests become his fanatical followers performing acts of adulation that display the “deepest instincts of men”. The annual feasts of Maternity, Life, Sustenance and Paternity mimic the ceremonial rituals of the Church but with nefarious effects.
The Church of Rome is rocked by scandals and desertions. “And now it has come to this. Christianity has smouldered away from Europe like a sunset on darkening peaks … and the Vicar of Christ sat in a whitewashed room… dressed as simple as His master waiting for the end.”
The last part of the book is entitled: “Book III – The Victory.”
The new pope – Pope Sylvester – seeks to gather the remaining cardinals in Nazareth after the destruction of Rome by the troops of Felsenburgh. The Anti-Christ “was coming now, swifter than ever, the heir of temporal ages and exile of eternity, the final Piteous Prince of rebels, the creature against God, blinder than the sun which paled and the earth which shook …”
As firebombs rain on Nazareth, Pope Sylvester and the remaining cardinals continue to chant the Tantum Ergo before a host exposed in a monstrance on the altar. The last words of the novel are: “Then the world passed, and the glory of it.”
Pope Benedict XVI (as Cardinal Ratzinger) said that the book Lord of the World describes “a … unified civilisation and its power to destroy the spirit. The Anti-Christ is the great carrier of peace in a new… world order.”
What we are seeing today does not necessarily indicate that the end of the world is nigh, but Mgr Benson’s book certainly does give us a feeling of déjà vu. What was once considered evil has now become acceptable with governments even legislating to ensure the embodiment of these concepts in national and international law.
Examples abound – euthanasia, abortion, mercy killing, the destruction of the family unit. Perhaps, Benedict’s warning about the modern trend of ‘relativism’, where people can have different views about what is moral and immoral, encompasses Felsenburgh’s ultimate model of the world and his supreme triumph.
This is a Times of Malta print opinion piece