Today, in headlines that shout and scream from newspapers, television, the Internet, the Roman Catholic Church is besieged and under attack once again. It is part of a more generalized assault on the remaining civilizational remnants of what once was recognized as the West. The Church was once at the center of Western Civilization. That is why such disparate elements such as the secular elite media, the “New Atheists,” Radical Islam, and the US Leviathan State continue their belligerency toward her. In order to begin to understand the fundamental historical backstory of the nature and sustained longevity of these attacks, I urge LRC readers read a nearly forgotten novel. It is one of the first examples of dystopian fiction, with later works such as We, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Brave New World to follow in its wake. It was consciously written in 1907 to portray the actual horrific consequences of the totalitarian humanism of the secular one-world government advocated by collectivists such as H. G. Welles and his Fabian socialist colleagues. It is called The Lord of the World, by Robert Hugh Benson. It has been championed by Pope Benedict XVI and several times lately by the present Pope, Francis, for its prophetic and chilling message.

To place this work in historical context I also urge you become familiar with the works of Hilaire Belloc – essayist, historian, novelist, poet, and polemicist, an ardent defender of the Roman Catholic faith, and an early critic of the welfare-warfare state. Begin with three counter-posed biographies of Belloc: Hilaire Belloc: Edwardian Radical, by John P. McCarthy; Old Thunder: A Life of Hilaire Belloc, by Joseph Pearce; and Hilaire Belloc: No Alienated Man – A Study in Christian Integration, by Frederick Wihelmsen. Belloc was the author of over one hundred books. The specific seven Belloc books which detail and elucidate the subject at hand are: Europe and the Faith; The Great Heresies; Survivals and New Arrivals; How the Reformation Happened; Characters of the Reformation; The Crisis of Civilization; and The Servile State. (You may also wish to consult the authoritative The Church Confronts Modernity: Catholic Intellectuals and the Progressive Era, by Thomas E. Woods, Jr., which deals with this specific time period of Belloc. Woods demolishes Belloc’s fallacious notions of Distributism here.)

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