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Hindustan Times
23-05-2025
- General
- Hindustan Times
Pope Francis' Favorite Dystopian Novel
Robert Hugh Benson, center, and his 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. 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. Get 360° coverage—from daily headlines to 100 year archives.
Spectator
17-05-2025
- Politics
- Spectator
Why I changed my mind about multiculturalism
When Blackburn MP Adnan Hussain complains about an opponent believing 'free speech means protecting the right to offend Muslims', you feel an instinctive response gathering in your throat. You're damn right it does. It means the right to burn the Qur'an, mock the Hadith and doodle cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed performing in a rainbow-flag hijab on RuPaul's Drag Race. In a liberal society, people should be free to blaspheme against any and all religions, even pretendy ones like Anglicanism. You should be free to tell Catholics they've built an entire church around one woman's genius excuse for getting knocked up by someone other than her husband. Free to tell Jews that when a solicitor gives you the title deed to a piece of land it's called conveyancing but when a voice in the sky does it it's called schizophrenia.
Yahoo
07-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Conclave Is Huge for the Future of the World. There's Another Choice Coming That Rivals It.
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. As Roman Catholic cardinals gather in Vatican City on Wednesday to select the next pope, on the other side of Europe another (much lengthier and, if you can believe it, even more secretive) process is underway to decide who will be the next archbishop of Canterbury, the highest-ranking bishop in the Church of England and the symbolic head of the global Anglican Communion, a worldwide 'family' of churches that are historically connected to the Church of England. The communion is one of the largest Christian fellowships in the world, with around 85 million members across more than 165 countries. The previous archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, announced his January 2025 resignation in November 2024, after an independent review, widely known as the Makin Report, found that he had failed to report the prolific child abuser John Smyth, who had committed some of his crimes in the course of his work for charities associated with the Anglican Church. And if this is all sounding vaguely reminiscent of similar demons haunting the Church of Rome, be assured that the similarities do not stop there. Welby's resignation comes at a time of deep division in the Church of England and the wider Anglican Communion, division largely centered on—you guessed it—issues of gender and sexuality. Because the Episcopal Church, the American province of the Anglican Communion, is widely known for its progressiveness, it is easy for Americans to forget that this is not necessarily reflected in the wider body. The Anglican Communion, and Anglicanism as a tradition, prides itself on its tolerance for disagreement and diversity, a legacy of the 16th-century Elizabethan Settlement, which transformed the divisive political (and romantic) project of Henry VIII into a unique theological tradition. As a result of this legacy, Anglicanism continues to hold together, within one ecclesiastical body, High-Church Anglo-Catholics and worship-band evangelicals, left-wing progressives, and right-wing reactionaries. This cacophony of perspectives is less pronounced in certain provinces of the communion. For example, the Episcopal Church is much more theologically and politically uniform today than previously, after decades of infighting and a painful split. But in the Church of England, the Anglican Communion's mother church, the full range of this diversity remains largely intact. This is in no small part because the Church of England is the only remaining established Anglican church. And it is the state religion. The king remains the church's supreme governor, and the archbishops of Canterbury and York, as well as 26 diocesan bishops, hold seats in the House of Lords. This also means that every resident of England, Anglican or not, lives within the confines of a parish and should be able to worship in the parish church and present themself to that parish for life events such as baptism, marriage, a funeral. This 'right to worship'—like the broader allowance for diverse worship styles and theological views—is one of the key foundations of the Elizabethan Settlement. However, over the past 30 years, culture-war debates over the inclusion of women and LGBTQ+ people have tested this agreement, which quite literally brought an end to the first phase of the English Reformation. The first battle (arguably still ongoing) was over the inclusion of women in the ordained ministry. These tensions have been dealt with by deferring to local opinion (though not to everyone's satisfaction). However, when the Rt. Rev. Gene Robinson was consecrated bishop of New Hampshire in 2003, the first openly gay person elevated to that ranking in the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion, not only did some American parishes break away from the Episcopal Church, forming the core of what is now the Anglican Church in North America, but the Episcopal Church's membership in the Anglican Communion came under threat. And the Episcopal Church was temporarily suspended from the communion in 2016, when it began to allow same-sex couples to marry. Although the Episcopal Church did, in the end, remain, the consecration of Robinson led directly to the creation of Global Anglican Future Conference, a gathering of conservative Anglican bishops aimed at limiting further progress on the inclusion of LGBTQ+ people within Anglican liturgical life. Even in 2022, at the most recent Lambeth Conference, the decennial gathering of Anglican bishops hosted by the archbishop of Canterbury, questions surrounding LGBTQ+ people dominated the debate. And, in what is undeniably not one of the shining moments of Christian hospitality, the then archbishop of Canterbury, Welby, invited the spouses of bishops in heterosexual marriages to attend the conference but did not invite the spouses of bishops in same-sex unions. As in the case of the Catholic Church (and the United Methodist Church and beyond), the conflict has often been presented, particularly by conservatives, as a clash between the West and the 'global south,' yet another instance of know-it-all Westerners attempting to impose their will, customs, and culture on the people of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. It is a charge that, given its implications of imperial cultural domination, has a particular sting when directed at the English—for obvious reasons. And so, while the Church of England is technically as independent as any other province in the Anglican Communion, its internal debate over LGBTQ+ inclusion has been shaped by concerns about the long-term viability of the communion itself. Two key issues lie at the heart of the debate: whether clergy should be permitted to enter into same-sex marriages, and whether same-sex marriages or civil partnerships should receive any form of public blessing—including marriage rites. These questions are also complicated by the Church of England's status as a state church. The Marriage (Same-Sex Couples) Act of 2013, which established marriage equality in the United Kingdom, specifically excluded religious institutions, including the Church of England, from having to perform same-sex marriages. It is an exception that stands in awkward tension with the centuries-old 'right to worship' and arguably a raison d'être for having a national church. The simple fact is that the Church of England is no longer a place where anyone in England can turn up to get married. This is the situation the next archbishop of Canterbury will inherit. And he will be selected in a different manner from any of his predecessors. In 2023 the General Synod voted to change the composition of the Crown Nominations Commission (the body that will recommend candidates to King Charles) to include five new representatives, one from each region of the Anglican Communion. This development has raised fears among progressives that conservative forces could receive additional support and succeed in appointing an archbishop to lead the Church of England whose views are far outside the English mainstream. At the same time, conservatives have voiced concerns that a progressive archbishop, one who, say, greenlights same-sex marriage, could cause more conservative provinces to flee the communion altogether. That is to say, the race for the next archbishop of Canterbury reflects the same divisions as faced by the Roman Catholic conclave, though put in much starker and more immediate terms. We will likely see the next pope step out on the balcony of St. Peter's months before word comes from the king as to the final decision of who will lead the Church of England and the Anglican Communion. But the fact that these two global churches, who have not been in communion with each other since Henry VIII wanted a divorce in 1534, seem to be experiencing the same problem reveals a great deal about the state of religion and society—and has very little to do with same-sex couples or their relationships, at least not really. They are just the unlucky symbols of a much bigger, more metaphysical debate. (One might say the same for immigrants and refugees, though that is another conversation.) We live in a moment of profound societal change, change that has put questions of identity, belonging, and community at the forefront of our public conversations and personal struggles. Religious institutions, once central to explaining the natural world and legitimizing political power, have long since lost that authority. For a time, they have clung to the role of moral arbitrator and communal glue, but even that, increasingly, is slipping away. We cannot agree on what our lives and relationships should look like and mean in this brave new world, and our churches don't seem to have any good answers. And so, just as we are fracturing our governments, schools, and families over questions of who we are and how we belong, we are doing the same to our churches—not because they have the answers, but because they no longer do. This is the stark reality for the next bishops of Rome and Canterbury—whoever they may be.
Straits Times
07-05-2025
- General
- Straits Times
Catholicism spreads amongst young Britons longing for 'something deeper'
LONDON - Twenty-three-year-old Joshua Steel found a "great sense of peace" that he couldn't find anywhere else when he started attending Catholic Mass in Britain. Twenty-six-year-old Dan Williamson was driven to convert to the faith by an "ache" he had for something "deeper and ancient and more rich". Both are among a growing number of men aged 18-34 who are going to church in Britain compared with before the COVID pandemic, upending the long-held tenet that Christianity was in generational decline in Western nations like Britain. As the cardinals gather to vote for Pope Francis's successor on May 7, as they have for centuries, it is the traditions and rituals of the Catholic Church, combined with a longing for connection and faith, which seem to hold an appeal for younger adults in Britain, and men in particular. "I was looking for meaning in life," Steel said after Mass ended at St. Elizabeth of Portugal church in southwest London on Sunday, as the smell of incense hung in the air. An Australian who moved to Britain in 2023, Steel was born into a Catholic family but never went to church, until he started trying to fill the "hole" he felt in his life. "I found Christ," he said. "I found a great sense of peace that I can't find anywhere else." The rising church attendance in England and Wales by younger people was illustrated in a Bible Society and YouGov report called the Quiet Revival in April, which surveyed 13,146 adults in November 2024. It found that Christians who go to church at least once a month make up 12% of the total population, up from 8% in 2018. For people aged 18-24, the proportion had risen to 16% from just 4% in 2018, making this age group the second most likely to go to church regularly after those aged 65 and over. The increase has been particularly pronounced among younger men, 21% of whom say they are regular churchgoers versus 12% of women aged 18-24. And almost 500 years after King Henry VIII's split with Rome to create the Church of England, Catholicism is now more popular than Anglicanism in the 18-34 age group of churchgoers, with 41% identifying as Catholic, up from 22% in 2018, and compared with the 20% who say they are Anglican, down from 30%. TRADITION IN VOLATILE TIMES According to the 20 people Reuters spoke to for this story, including Catholic converts, faith leaders and academics, reasons cited included the destabilising impact of the pandemic, a desire for ancient tradition in volatile times, a wish to volunteer, and a disillusionment with the modern world. The report also said those who attended church were more satisfied and had a greater feeling of connection to community - an appealing prospect in the digital age when complaints about anxiety and mental health problems are surging. Williamson, who converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism, and has struggled with anxiety, said he had found reassurance in a connection to the past. "It is grounded in this thing which is so much bigger than ourselves," he said. "We're probably the first generation to try and live without God, and I think we're slowly just saying that doesn't work." David Stewart, a priest in Edinburgh, started a young adults' Catholic group with about 30 people three years ago. He now has 100 regular young attendees at Sunday evening Mass, and over 200 people in a WhatsApp group. Stewart said most of those coming to his Edinburgh group had no background in religion and about 60-80% of them were men, with many working in software and financial services. "They're looking for something deeper," he said. The St. Elizabeth church in London has seen similar growth in its youth wing after churchgoer Georgia Clarke, 28, launched a Zoom call to help a handful of teenagers battling isolation during the pandemic. Its youth group is now 100 strong. She said she had tried to reach people in the same "humble" way Pope Francis had, shunning the more traditional focus on preparing for the sacraments of communion and confirmation, in favour of informal conversations. "It's inspired many of us, including myself, in how we can be more outward looking," she said. Aidan Geboers, 29, a regular at a Catholic church in Mayfair, central London, who works in the banking industry, said he enjoyed the sense of belonging and community. "It is really nice to not be in front of a screen, be around people, you know, just expressing faith," he said. SPARKING A DEBATE The apparent growth in the number of young people going to church in Britain has sparked a debate about its appeal. According to the census the number of people in Britain describing themselves as Christian dropped to 46% of the population in England and Wales, from 59% in 2011. But academics said the smaller number that remained were more committed to their faith, and attending church. Unlike the United States, politicians and public figures in Britain have generally been more reticent about religion, with an aide to Tony Blair once saying "We don't do God" when an interviewer asked about the former prime minister's faith. Blair converted to Catholicism in 2007. That has changed however, with the rapper Stormzy and Arsenal footballer Bukayo Saka, just two prominent young Britons amongst many who are open about their Christian faith and share their beliefs on social media. Rising immigration from more religious societies has also increased the public discussion on faith, with young Muslims talking both online and off about the joy of Ramadan. And faith leaders say social media has provided young people with an easy entry into religion. Britain's biggest Christian publisher SPCK said 310,458 bibles were sold in the UK in 2024, up from 258,391 in 2023, and 194,013 in 2018. The Catholic Church says it has grown globally, with the Catholic population rising by around 1% to 1.406 billion between 2022 and 2023, with the U.S. Vice President JD Vance one of the most high-profile after he converted in 2019. Stewart in Edinburgh said for some, attendance marked a rejection of the culture of toxic masculinity and instead opting for "fellowship, tolerance and service of others". Tim Hutchings, Associate Professor of Religious Ethics, University of Nottingham, said the pandemic could have given a boost given the social isolation faced by youngsters at a formative age, and the growth could also be seen as a possible backlash against progressive politics and decline of traditional roles. "Maybe as part of that, young people, and particularly young men are saying, let's get into a really conservative, anti-feminist institution," he said. Pope Francis appointed more women than ever before to top Vatican positions but disappointed some advocates for greater roles for women in the wider Church by putting off the question of allowing women to be ordained as clergy. For the priest at St Elizabeth's, Father Stephen Langridge, the draw was the ancient traditions which are "consoling in a world where everything seems to be transient, nothing seems to be lasting." "Are we seeing a seismic shift?" he asked. "I don't know. But what we are seeing is a significant shift." REUTERS Join ST's Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you.
News24
23-04-2025
- Health
- News24
Prince William to represent King Charles at Pope Francis's funeral
Prince William will represent King Charles III at Pope Francis's funeral at the Vatican on Saturday, continuing a modern tradition. This marks a significant step for William as a global statesman and future king. Spain's royals, joined by political leaders, will also attend the funeral. Kensington Palace said on Tuesday that Prince William will represent Britain's royal family at Pope Francis's funeral at the Vatican on Saturday. The palace said the heir to the throne will attend the service "on behalf" of King Charles III, in a decision in keeping with modern tradition. When he was Prince of Wales, Charles represented his late mother, Queen Elizabeth II, at Pope John Paul II's funeral in 2005. Elizabeth never attended the funeral of a pontiff during her reign from 1952 to 2022. The British monarch is head of the Church of England, the mother church of global Anglicanism. British media said William's attendance at the funeral will be seen as a major milestone in his role as a global statesman and future king. Charles and his wife, Queen Camilla, met Pope Francis for 20 minutes during the royal couple's state visit to Italy earlier this month. Charles, 76, began treatment in February 2024 for an unnamed cancer and was recently briefly admitted to hospital after experiencing side effects. Spanish royals also attending King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia of Spain will join world leaders attending Pope Francis's funeral at the Vatican on Saturday, the royal palace told AFP. Addressing a Madrid reception on Tuesday, Felipe said the 88-year-old Argentine pontiff transcended the Catholic Church to become "an enormous ethical beacon of our world, of our time". Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez will not accompany them, Justice Minister Felix Bolanos told reporters after signing a book of condolence for Francis in Madrid. The Spanish delegation headed by the royals "will be made up of first deputy prime minister Maria Jesus Montero, second deputy prime minister Yolanda Diaz, the leader of the opposition Alberto Nunez Feijoo, and myself", said Bolanos.
