Pope Francis’ Favorite Dystopian Novel

He saw ‘Lord of the World’ (1907) as an ‘antidote’ to ‘worldly totalitarianism.’

Robert Hugh Benson, center, and his brothers.

Were you to have asked Pope Francis to name his favorite book, he would probably have said the Bible. Asked for his favorite novel, however, he might have mentioned a dystopian thriller in which the Antichrist is a senator from Vermont.

Pope Francis’ Favorite Dystopian Novel

The Holy Father certainly talked it up during his papacy. “I was deeply struck when I read it,” he wrote in “Hope,” his memoir, published in January. He praised the book as “a prophecy” in one of his earliest papal homilies and recommended it to journalists in 2015: “I advise you to read it.”

The book is “Lord of the World,” by Robert Hugh Benson (1871-1914), an English priest whose conversion from Anglicanism in 1903 attracted national attention because his late father had been the archbishop of Canterbury. “I proposed becoming a Roman Catholic,” wrote the son, “because I believed that Church to be the Church of God.”

Hugh, as friends called him, was the youngest of several literary siblings. A pair of brothers, E.F. and A.C. Benson, wrote novels and poetry but today are best known for their ghost stories, including one that Rod Serling adapted for “The Twilight Zone.” A sister, Margaret Benson, was an Egyptologist.

“Lord of the World” (1907) eclipsed them all. Its title alludes to the tale of Christ’s temptation in the desert, described in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, in which the devil offers a deal: If Jesus will agree to worship Satan, Jesus will gain “all the kingdoms of the world.” Jesus refuses, but Benson proposes that much of humanity would accept the terms and conditions, purging God for promises of power.

Benson wrote in a preface that “Lord of the World” was “a terribly sensational book,” and some of its renown comes from his technological forecasting. Much in the way that Jules Verne imagined submarines and flights to the moon in his 19th-century science-fiction novels, Benson predicted air travel, mass transit, artificial light, heat vents and weapons of mass destruction. His gee-whiz wonders exist alongside typewriters and telegraphs, creating a steampunk aesthetic that 21st-century readers may find pleasing.

Yet that isn’t why Francis plugged it. In 2013, he said that the opening chapter of the First Book of Maccabees is “one of the saddest pages in the Bible” because “a great part of the people of God withdraw from the Lord in favor of worldly proposals.” He then pointed to Benson, arguing that the novelist had portrayed a modern society whose inhabitants made the same mistake: “He envisioned what would happen.”

What Benson envisioned was a communistic Europe that had nationalized its industries and disestablished its churches. In London, St. Paul’s Cathedral is rebranded as “Paul’s House,” a meeting hall. Paris’s Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Montmartre becomes a transport hub for zeppelins. The government shuts down universities, encourages euthanasia and persecutes Christians. Only a few of them remain, including a small number of Catholics who provide the only real resistance to the state’s “dogmatic secularism.”

Into this grim environment steps Julian Felsenburgh, a charismatic politician who begins as a senator from Vermont. As he travels to other countries, he grows in popular acclaim and uses his wiles to become a messiah to mobs, the “President of Europe” and eventually the ruler of just about everything. He is in fact the Antichrist, “represented as a great carrier of peace,” observed another admirer of the novel—Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI—in a 1992 speech that cautioned against global government. In the story, Felsenburgh promises world peace but launches a devastating attack on Rome.

Felsenburgh is Benson’s Big Brother, even though “Lord of the World” appeared decades before George Orwell’s “1984,” published in 1949. It also predates the other classics of 20th-century dystopian fiction: “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley (1932), “Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury (1953), and “The Giver” by Lois Lowry (1993). While those novels also describe godless regimes, their stories have little to say about religion.

“Lord of the World,” by contrast, is full of faith, and Francis used it to raise alarms about the dangers of imposing Western secular values on developing nations by forcing them, as a condition of humanitarian aid, to adopt policies involving contraception, same-sex marriage and transgenderism: “Reading it, you will understand what I mean by ‘ideological colonization.’ ”

“Lord of the World,” he added in 2023, warns of “a future in which differences are disappearing and everything is the same, everything is uniform, a single leader of the whole world.” In “Hope,” he described the book as “an antidote to teenage progressivism, to that worldly totalitarianism that leads to apostasy.”

It spoils nothing to say that the book ends with a scene so apocalyptic that it might be called “biblical”—and, at least for readers who share Francis’ faith, surprisingly hopeful.

Mr. Miller is director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College.