When the celebrated Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson published his utopia The Dawn of All in 1911, he was answering critics who said that his 1907 Lord of the World envisioned too hopeless a future for the Catholic Church – one of continued persecution, with the Church driven underground once again. Both Pope Francis and his immediate predecessor (when he was Cardinal Ratzinger) recommended Lord of the World. The trends of today make the Lord of the World scenario all too probable.
Is a Dawn of All scenario possible? In Benson’s later work, a monsignor wakes up after years in a coma to discover, to his disbelief, a world in which Catholicism stands on the verge of conquest. Asking why Catholicism has approached a moment of triumph, the monsignor is told that its doctrines turned out to be well suited to answering the fundamental questions of the age. The nascent field of psychology, Benson imagines, could yield instead to a renewal of Catholicism’s insights about the soul.
