"Lord of the World" - Robert Hugh Benson

 

From the Wikipedia article:

In March 2023, Pope Francis again mentioned that he "always recommends" Lord of the World during an interview with the Argentine newspaper La Nación. He referenced the book within the context of "ideological colonization" and in response to a question about non-binary gender options appearing on government forms, saying that such a phenomenon reminded him of the Benson's "futuristic" world, “in which differences are disappearing and everything is the same, everything is uniform, a single leader of the whole world.”

Robert Hugh Benson’s 1907 dystopian novel, "Lord of the World", parallels the Book of Revelation to a significant extent, particularly in its depiction of the Antichrist, the persecution of the faithful, and the ultimate conflict between good and evil. However, it focuses on a direct critique of modern secularism and uses a conventional narrative structure. Benson's novel can be seen as a modern reimagining of the apocalyptic themes of Revelation, tailored to the concerns and anxieties of his own time, which are not dissimilar to our own, hence its enduring popularity. It also has its moments of striking prediction, including weapons akin to thermonuclear bombs.

Its style reflects the transition between the stodgy Victorian novel and the more readable style coming into fashion in the first decade of the twentieth century. As Pope Francis remarks, it starts with a heavy data dump but improves after that, becoming quite page turning. It's plain, pedestrian writing you'll find here nonetheless.

Its catholicism is old-fashioned: robust, down-the-line, rather literalist supernaturalism. There are plenty of Latin prayers which you may need the Internet to make sense out of: I suppose Benson expected his readership to just know them.