Lord of the World

Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson's dystopian science fiction book, ''Lord of the World'' published in 1907, centers on Antichrist's rule and the end of the world. Dale Ahlquist, Joseph Pearce, Pope Benedict XVI, and Pope Francis have all referred to it as prophetic. Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson, a former High Church Anglican Vicar who converted to Catholicism in 1903, started writing Lord of the World two years later, sending the Church of England into shock. Robert Benson came from a very long line of Anglican ministers and was the youngest son of Edward White Benson, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Mary Sidgwick Benson, a social hostess. It was widely thought that he would one day succeed his father as the most senior cleric in the Anglican Communion because he had also read the litany at his father's death in Canterbury Cathedral in 1896. Benson, however, was accepted into the Catholic Church on September 11, 1903, following a spiritual crisis detailed in his 1913 memoir Confessions of a Convert. The news that the son of the former Archbishop of Canterbury had converted to Catholicism was widely covered by the media, and the Anglican establishment was also shaken by the revelation.