The Lord of the World

“The Lord of the World” and the Battle of the Next Conclave
Rereading Robert Hugh Benson's dystopia to understand what is shaking the Church. Not a power struggle, but a choice between complicity with the world and fidelity to an irreducible truth.

If there is one book that could explain the climate that will accompany the next conclave better than a thousand academic articles, it is not a geopolitical essay or a lengthy analysis of the currents among the cardinals. It is a dystopian novel written more than a century ago, The Lord of the World by Robert Hugh Benson.

Published in 1907 by an English priest who converted to Catholicism, this book remained on the fringes of Catholic culture until, one day, Pope Francis brought it back to the fore, openly recommending it for reading. It is rare for a pontiff to recommend fiction, especially one as dark and disturbing as this.

The plot, at its core, is simple: a charismatic world leader—the Antichrist, but without horns or flames—manages to seduce humanity by preaching an ideology of global unity, absolute equality, and the overcoming of religious conflicts. The people, tired of war and division, accept enthusiastically.

The new social order promises peace, prosperity, and dignity for all, provided they renounce all particular truths and any transcendence that challenges the primacy of reason and technology. In a short time, the Church becomes the last remaining opposition, the last obstacle to a perfectly administered world. And the new global power, born for peace, does not hesitate to repress, eliminate, and destroy anyone who does not conform.

The profound paradox that Benson had intuited—and that Francis has seen resurface in our time—is that the most dangerous evil does not come with immediate brutality, but with the promise of a universal good stripped of all verticality. Not spectacular persecution, but stealthy neutralization. Not sensational martyrdom, but slow, smiling, administrative cultural disarmament.

In The Lord of the World, all this is intertwined with a description of religious decline that seems written for us: empty churches, liturgies reduced to cultural spectacles, faith confined to the private sphere as a picturesque quirk. In that world, the Catholic Church is not defeated on the political level: it is eroded from within, marginalized until it seems first useless, then harmful, and finally dangerous.

Francis has often spoken of “ideological colonization” as the great contemporary risk: the attempt to reorganize humanity on completely new foundations, eliminating the natural order, sexual difference, deep-rooted affiliations, everything that cannot be constructed at a desk. In this, his reading of Benson is much less nostalgic than it appears at first glance: it is not a call to an idealized Middle Ages, but a warning about a modernity that risks abolishing even the fruitful conflict between faith and the world.

The next conclave, which is approaching in a less spectacular and more restless atmosphere than usual, will also be played out along this fault line. The cardinals will not be divided so much on purely disciplinary or doctrinal issues. The real question will be: should the next pope seek a new alliance with the global world or accept being a sign of contradiction, as the Gospel says, even at the cost of marginalization?

The debate that Benson anticipates with extraordinary clarity is reappearing today in more subtle ways. A more “accommodating” pontiff, skilled in dialogue with major global institutions, could lead to a more respected, more integrated Church, perhaps more effective in concrete battles (peace, poverty, climate). But a Pope who chooses strongly to reaffirm the Christian mystery, the irreducible otherness of faith, risks instead a season of isolation, of apparent irrelevance, of minority experienced as a vocation.

In the novel, the Pope remains in Rome until the end, while the world collapses under the pressure of a false unity. He does not abandon his post, he does not sign compromises, he does not seek diplomatic shortcuts. It is an image that may seem out of place today, in the age of strategies and “institutional relations.” But perhaps it is precisely this stubborn fidelity, this obstinacy to remain what one is, that ultimately explains why The Lord of the World continues to disturb contemporary readers, from Francis down.

When the cardinals lock themselves in the Sistine Chapel, most commentators will interpret the event regarding currents, geopolitics, and power management. And of course, all this will have its weight. But beneath the game of visible alliances, a more serious question will flow: what face of the Church does the world need to encounter today? A Church that explains itself as part of a great project of human progress? Or a Church that accepts to be, always and in any case, the voice that stands out from the crowd, the nuisance that power cannot stomach?

After all, as Benson intuited, it is never evil that seems frightening at first. It is good that becomes insubstantial. It is love that empties itself of mystery. It is truth that bends to courtesy. It is faith that is reduced to emotion or folklore. And precisely for this reason, the choice that the cardinals will make in the coming months will also be a choice between two conceptions of time: that of those who believe that Christianity can only survive by becoming irrelevant, and that of those who believe that it survives precisely in its irreducibility.

The next Pope, whoever he may be, will not bring with him only an agenda or a personal sensibility. He will bring with him a way of reading the present time, whether he sees our world as a potential ally or a potential deception, whether he chooses to dialogue or to resist, whether he believes that the future is won by being at the heart of power or, at times, painfully on its margins.

Benson, with his prophetic novel, reminds us that the real battle of the Church is never for power, but for the meaning of time. It is choosing whether to be guardians of something the world cannot absorb or managers of a perfect and faithless humanity. This will be, ultimately, the silent knot that will be untied in the next conclave. And perhaps, even without realizing it, the cardinals will be answering the same question that Benson asked over a century ago: do we still believe that the world needs something it cannot give itself?