Lord of the World: Justifying Catholicism

After several stops and starts, I've eventually finished reading Robert Hugh Benson's dystopian novel, Lord of the World:

Absolutely loved reading this, but it was a haunting experience especially when considering the leftist totalitarianism that the Western world is now nosediving towards. The novel encapsulates just what it means to hold the embattled position of being an orthodox-minded Catholic when everything is being destroyed by a secularist world without God, grace, forgiveness, and redemption.

My favourite lines in the novel are from page 242, near the start of part III of Chapter I of Book III: The Victory, when Father Percy Franklin, now Pope Silvester, discloses something of his "inner life":

      "He acted rather than indulged in reflex thought. But the centre of His position was simple faith.
       The Catholic Religion ... gave the only adequate explanation of the universe; it did not unlock all
       mysteries, but it unlocked more than any other key known to man ... it was the only system of
       thought that satisfied man as a whole and accounted for him in his essential nature".

In my life, I've explored all kinds of materialist ideologies and other religions, but none have given me a greater sense of truth than (pre-Vatican II type) Catholicism, especially concerning man's body-soul nature.

The only thing that disappointed me in Lord of the World is that poor Mabel Brand misses the signs/ opportunities to convert to Catholicism, and instead chooses to end her life in a euthanasia clinic in Manchester after she has observed the bloodthirsty nature of secular 'humanism' in action.

And what about the closing scenes of the novel in Nazareth? Well, Cardinal Dolgorovski is obviously a Judas figure. Moreover, the final pages remind me of TS Eliot's Murder in a Cathedral, as, like St. Thomas Becket, Pope Silvester's whole soul accepts, embraces, and welcomes the inevitability of martyrdom:

      "Then this world passed, and the glory of it".

This is, of course, an ironic reference to the passing of an earthly world with a baseline secularist 'glory' without God.

During a recent Taylor Marshall (brilliant Catholic convert/apologist) Youtube piece, he said something like: the leftist revolutionaries who are currently wrecking the Western world as we know it, can smash things to pieces, destroy our churches, and maybe even come to kill us, but they can't take away our faith or eternal destiny. For me, it was more than just coincidence that I heard this immediately after finishing Lord of the World, it was like a final explanation of the meaning behind Benson's truly great Catholic novel.