With two recent papal endorsements, it is not surprising that Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson's 1907 dystopian novel Lord of the World has been republished in 2016 by Ave Maria Press. Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI and Pope Francis see Benson's novel as prophetic; and Pope Francis warns readers to watch out for the actualization of the "globalization of hegemonic uniformity" displayed in the novel's pages.

Lord of the World is notably prophetic in its depiction of widespread approval of euthanasia and assisted suicide by the early 21st century. The sentimental relativism and unquestioning materialism that condone these acts in the book are frighteningly like the mindset that recently led to the Senate's passing of legislation legalizing euthanasia in Canada.

In Benson's book, Communist leader Oliver Brand and his wife, Mabel, illustrate the consequences of relativism, but their beliefs are complicated by the fact that the book is about the Antichrist, Julian Felsenburgh, ultimately seen by the smitten mob as "Lord and God," the consummate expression of humanity. Felsenburgh first rises to power through his successful diplomatic negotiations with the East, which in the novel casts a threat as ominous as that of ISIS today. His success serves to distract the West from perceiving its own moral depravity, and Felsenburgh assumes the role of saviour. Here, Man worships Man. Monsignor Benson emphasizes the paradox that the society that most worships Man is the one that has the least regard for human life. Though Benson was inaccurate in some minor matters, like the ubiquity of volors – flying machines – and typewriters in the 21st century, as alternates to present-day airplanes and computers, he was prescient in greater matters, such as that of legalized euthanasia. Discovering the mindset in Lord of the World helps us to understand our own society.

To understand Benson's didactic style in representing Catholicism, especially as embodied by his hero, Fr. Percy Franklin, the reader may find it helpful to learn that, for Benson, faith was a matter of will rather than of emotion or imagination. Some readers might take umbrage at the supposed disestablishment of the Anglican Church in 1929 or the near disappearance of almost every denomination except Catholicism. It helps to realize that for Benson, the priest-son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Catholic Church held no emotional appeal when he decided to defect to Rome. Received into the Catholic Church in 1903 and ordained a Catholic priest in 1904, Benson wrote about "Truth, as aloof as an ice peak" and about coming "into a pale daylight of cold and dreary certainty." With insight into nervous disorders, Benson advocated for the treatment of depression the contemplation of the "Eternal Facts of Religion." He was suspicious of emotion that replaced divinely appointed authority as the basis for faith, so it is no wonder that he portrays Pope John XXIV as authoritative rather than likeable and Father Franklin as saintly because he clings with all his will to his Catholic faith. By no means does Benson denigrate man's need for beauty and its poetic expression. On the contrary, by the end of the novel, he shows the alignment of truth and beauty. It is sentimentalism that he rejects as a basis for truth.

Benson's experience of relativism in the Anglican Church of his day caused him to eschew relativism in Lord of the World. Benson wrote that "authority is, really, non-existent" in the Anglican Church, suggesting that the Catholic Church's main draw for him was its central authority. Characters such as Oliver and Mabel Brand display adherence to an inconsistent authority, usually found within themselves. They are frequently unyielding in neutral matters and sentimental in matters of life and death. For instance, when a volor crashes in front of her, Mabel's "heart leap[s] in relief" when she witnesses the Government's Ministers of Euthanasia rush in to dispatch the wounded and dying. Her husband later comforts her by saying that she knows that "the euthanisers [sic] are the real priests." He does not mean that the euthanizers are midwives for human souls, because he does not believe that the soul outlives the mind after death. Later, when Mabel takes upon herself the involuntary euthanization of Oliver's mother, who wants more than anything to die within the Catholic Church, Oliver commends Mabel's action with "something very like tenderness." Benson anticipated the so-called "compassion" of today that regards euthanasia as the correct response to suffering, rather than seeing suffering as the crucible that leads to eternal life. Throughout the novel, the "merciful" ending of life, whether voluntary or involuntary, is contrasted with purposeful suffering.

The relativism of morals in the society of Lord of the World contrasts with the rigid prescription of non-moral issues. For example, in the Prologue when Father Franklin and his friend Father Francis visit the elderly Mr. Templeton, the contents of his abode are shown to be mandated as to their colour, size and material. London itself is now a "city of rubber," with noises and vibrations deliberately silenced. This is why, at the novel's conclusion, characters are awed and alarmed by the ominous sky above them. So successful have civil authorities been at mastering creation that London had long known "no difference between dark and light." The order achieved by man is often severe, linear and regimented, whereas the order achieved by God is typically graceful and riotous in line and colour. (It is G.K. Chesterton who speaks of "the vitality and the variety… the infinite eccentricity of existence.") Benson demonstrates that once man has gone beyond his rightful ordering of creation to negation of creation, he will also see life and death as falling within his domain.

Benson's willed adherence to his faith does not mean that he lost sight of the worth of the individual and his subjectivity; in fact, Benson saw the Catholic Church as the last bastion of individualism. In Lord of the World, universities have fallen, and Felsenburgh, now the President of Europe, is breaking down all barriers, whether among individuals, families, parties or countries. While such global uniformity deceives many, Father Franklin and other spiritually astute characters are aware of the danger that Felsenburgh poses to the individual. Interestingly, in 1986, Hans Urs von Balthasar wrote of the need for the modern Church to integrate into her teaching "the subjective awareness of truth"; yet almost a century earlier Benson had shown how faith is coloured by the individual's "I will." While Benson sees the danger of too much subjectivity in matters of faith, in his novel, he pays tribute to the value of the individual. The alternative, he shows, is a mob mentality – what Father Franklin perceives with dismay as "one huge, sentient being with one will, one emotion and one head." Such a beast, adoring Felsenburgh, contrasts with the infinite variety of individuals free in God, individuals meant to reflect the attributes of their Creator.

As opposed to the meaningless abstractions of the Antichrist and his followers, Benson portrays a faith that is profoundly incarnational and therefore specific. Although Father Franklin's friend Father Francis defects to Felsenburgh's side, he is still able to tell the doubting Mabel that "the Incarnation is really the point." Unfrocked as he is, Father Francis still knows that God become Man is the core of Christian belief. Throughout the novel, Benson stresses a right relation between the spiritual and material that is based on the Incarnation. At Christmas Eve Mass in Rome before the city's destruction, Father Franklin contemplates the Host as the One Hope of the world's believers, "as mighty and little as once within the manger." Fr. Franklin has always known that the spiritual finds expression in the material. By the end of the book, the external is swept up and proven by the spiritual, contrasted with the humanistic philosophy of a character like Mabel. Paradoxically, out of her materialism come sentimental abstractions, so that she tells herself, "What a strange and beautiful thing death [is]…this resolution of a chord that had hung suspended for thirty, fifty or seventy years – back again into the stillness of the huge Instrument that was all in all to itself." When death is not seen as the graduation of the individual to the greater individuality of the afterlife, sentimental assessments of the end are often all that remain to survivors. The absence of belief in the afterlife leaves man alone to give death meaning.

Benson illustrates how it is logical that someone like Felsenburgh should decree that all believers in God be euthanized. At the pagan Festival of Maternity that he has founded, when the stone idol is revealed, Felsenburgh calls himself "the humble superhuman son of a Human Mother." His triumph, he says, is that he "bore not a sword but peace, not a cross but a crown." He has not only declared himself God Incarnate, and therefore the source of meaning, but also, ironically, declared universal peace through the abolition of all Christians. With his silence, he has given implicit approval to the mob's crucifixion and stoning of Christians, and now he approves of the Test Act, by which all believers in God should be euthanized. For him, Christians are the wound in the Body of Man because they submit to a Transcendent Other who does not exist. Sometimes violence, but preferably euthanasia, is a hallowed means of healing the wound. The Peace Felsenburgh promises is shown to be a spurious kind, based on what René Girard calls "the illusion of the guilty scapegoat."

Benson unsettles us by revealing that everything Felsenburgh says and does is a mirror image of Truth. His method is to silence and sway the mob by meaningless abstractions such as "universal brotherhood" or "Spirit of Peace," meaningless because they imply the opposite of what happens. It is not even clear whether Felsenburgh assumes divine titles or whether he receives them from the adoring mob. Again and again in Lord of the World, someone comments to Father Franklin that, with his white hair and young face, he looks very much like Felsenburgh. Benson's point is antithesis, to show how two men can be similar yet diametrically opposite. The two have their final encounter in Nazareth, where Father Franklin, now Pope Silvester III, waits for the end of all things.

The martyrdom that Pope Silvester awaits had been the choice of many Catholics before him. As exemplified in the character of Mabel Brand, however, voluntary euthanasia is the opposite of voluntary martyrdom. Mabel is so disillusioned by the violence condoned by Felsenburgh and his followers that, unknown to her husband, she checks into a voluntary euthanasia clinic. She seeks a death that, to her, is justified by mental anguish. After waiting the eight days required by law, Mabel submits to the "escape" of a death that is unencumbered by any inconvenient belief in an afterlife. Her choice is a denial that there is hope left on earth, and so is the opposite of the choice of martyrdom. When 40 members of Father Franklin's new religious order, the Order of Christ Crucified, are burned alive, Father Franklin considers their deaths "a victory." In fact, one of the charisms of the Order is their willingness for martyrdom. Benson deliberately contrasts these deaths with instances of euthanasia. He would agree with Chesterton that the martyr is the opposite of the suicide, for the first stakes his life on "something outside him" while the latter wants "to see the last of everything." In spite of Mabel's suicide, though, Benson shows she dies with understanding of God's mercy. Even after her grave sin and conditional prayers, we are told that "then she saw, and understood." Benson wishes us to know that God's mercy is available to the very end.

Another Chestertonian aspect of the novel is that Benson emphasizes that rigid logic, rather than poetry, drives characters mad. In her final letter to her husband, Mabel writes that she understands his logic that "peace must have its laws and must protect itself." She tells him that she must end everything because that kind of "peace" is not what she wants; she cannot bear it that what has happened "is all quite logical and right." Benson implies that it is Mabel's sense of poetry that saves her. Chesterton contrasts the logician "who seeks to get the heavens into his head" with the poet who "only asks to get his head into the heavens."

Mabel is a sympathetic character, suggesting that her author is possessed of both logic and poetry. That is illustrated by the novel's final chapter, in which words themselves are subsumed into the Divine. Despite his fierce adherence to the "Eternal Facts of Religion," Benson also shows us the need for poetic imagination aligned with truth so we will not deceive ourselves with specious logic and false compassion. Only then can we assess ideas such as "the right to die."