A prophetic journey and a new adventure for Shalom Publishing House

The Lord of the World is the first novel published by Editrice Shalom. This choice is not accidental: The Lord of the World, first published in 1907, is astonishingly relevant today and, in this sense, can be called prophetic.

Who was Robert Hugh Benson?

The author was a priest in the Anglican Church who converted to Catholicism in 1903 and received priestly ordination the following year. A preacher, apologist, essayist, and polemicist, he was also a novelist, and to write about what mattered most to him, to describe, or rather interpret, the signs of the tragic landscape of his time (and beyond), he chose the novel form because he was convinced it could make a greater impact and prompt a reaction.

A dystopian novel for understanding his times…

Benson lived between 1871 and 1914 in early twentieth-century England, so the events that would convulse Europe - the First World War (1914) and the October Revolution in Russia (1917) - were still relatively distant. Yet when he wrote The Lord of the World (1907), it was as though he sensed that the world was heading in a desperate direction: society lived by the myth of technological progress (Guglielmo Marconi’s radio or Ford’s automobile, to give just a few examples), deluded itself into thinking it was self-sufficient and could silence the presence of God, and failed to see that it was approaching a tragic precipice.
To describe his time and call people back to the profound truths in which he believes, Benson therefore chooses to use the genre of the alternative historical or dystopian novel: that is, he imagines another world and another time, history as it might have been… and invents a “future” world, covered in rubber and anesthetized by the absence of noise, in which the myth of progress and the deification of humanity are gaining the upper hand, while people delude themselves into thinking they no longer need God. In this setting, the characters embody the various tensions on which the novel intends to reflect: the undisputed and opposing protagonists are Father Percy Franklin, the future last Pope, and Julian Felsenburgh, a figure of the Antichrist.
“In Benson’s novel, the world seems to have achieved peace and happiness outside Catholicism, indeed in spite of all religions, but its peace is a mortifying quietism, and its happiness is purely natural. The world has been reduced to a body without a soul” (Corrado Raspini, translator of the first Italian edition).
In a world like this, mercy and humanity reveal themselves, for example, in resorting to euthanasia for those who are about to die or who choose to die; in condemning every form of violence, only to go so far as to decree the death, albeit inflicted by “humane” and therefore painless methods, of those who continue to believe in God. In a world like this, man is the measure of all things, leading to the absurdity of identifying man himself with God.

… And Our Times

in this dystopian vision of his, Benson seems to be capturing the direction the world is currently taking: a world increasingly forgetful of God, convinced that it can manage on its own, obsessed with technological progress, a world in which war between East and West looms - the conflict from which Benson’s novel begins; a world that believes it can decide over life and death, as shown by the debates on end-of-life issues and abortion.
Pope Francis himself emphasizes this novel’s relevance: “In a novel I have cited several times, The Lord of the World, by Robert Benson, we observe ‘that mechanical complexity is not synonymous with true greatness and that the more ostentatious the exterior, the more subtly danger lies hidden within’ (Verona 2014, 24-25). In this book, in a certain sense ‘prophetic,’ written more than a century ago, a future dominated by technology is described, in which everything, in the name of progress, is standardized: everywhere a new ‘humanitarianism’ is preached that erases differences, wiping out the lives of peoples and abolishing religions. Abolishing all differences. Opposing ideologies converge in a standardization that ideologically colonizes. This is the tragedy, ideological colonization; in contact with machines, human beings become increasingly flattened, while communal life becomes sad and sparse. In that advanced yet gloomy world described by Benson, where everyone seems insensitive and anesthetized, it seems obvious to discard the sick and apply euthanasia, just as it seems obvious to abolish national languages and cultures in order to achieve universal peace, which in reality becomes a persecution founded on the imposition of conformity, to the point that one protagonist declares that ‘the world seems to be at the mercy of a perverse vitality that corrupts and confuses everything’ (p. 145).” (Pope Francis, Address of the Holy Father on the occasion of the Meeting with the University and Culture, April 30, 2023). 

…Until the Lord returns

“It seems to me that even now the catastrophe could be approaching rapidly. No; I see no hope until… Until the Lord returns.” This is what Benson has one of his characters say: humanity’s tragic illusion that it can do without God and believe itself to be God leads it to a ruthless logic, bringing it to the brink of the abyss, because without God, human beings struggle even to recognize themselves as human…

The Lord of the World is a powerful novel that invites us to reflect on an issue that is more urgent than ever today, helping us understand our times and live our faith with greater awareness.

Discover now