I do enjoy Monsignor Benson’s “Lord of the World”, but there is one matter in it which deeply troubles me. It involves Fr. Percy Franklin successfully urging the Pope to ban all other Liturgies except the Latin Rite. 

At the time Lord of the World was written, the Eastern Catholic martyrs of the Red Terror and the Armenian Genocide were still in the future. Saint Josaphat of Polotsk and the 13 Martyrs of Pratulin were not, however. 

Despite their martyrdom, there was a viewpoint  held by many Latin Rite Catholics in Mgr. Benson’s time that Eastern Rite Catholicism was “half-schismatic” and a “spiritual dead end.” As a solution, they recommended, like Father Franklin, that all Eastern Catholics be forcibly transferred to the Latin Rite. Some, like Cardinal Walter Kasper, still hold this view.

Although this statement angers me, I cannot blame Mgr. Benson. His brother has written that his novels were always written very soon after Mgr. Benson first conceived of them. When one also considers the one year of seminary studies between Mgr. Benson’s conversion and his ordination yo the Catholic priesthood, it is likely that he was never taught about certain matters.

What I still cannot understand, however, is how Mgr. Benson got away with such a statement at the time he wrote it. Pope St. Pius X most definitely did not agree with those who denigrated Eastern Catholicism.

In 1907, the year that LOTW was published, Pope Pius met with the Ukrainian Catholic Metropolitan of Lvov and Halych and laid plans with him to erect an Eastern Catholic Underground Church in Tsarist Russia. 

The following year, in 1908, Pope Pius presided over the ceremonies to mark the  1,500th Feast Day of St. John Chrysostom. On this occasion, His Holiness personally addressed the assembled Eastern Catholic Hierarchs and called them the glory and the crown of the Universal Church.

Although I otherwise consider LOTW to be a literary masterpiece, I am rather curious as to how Mgr. Benson avoided a Vatican order to remove that passage. Had he received such an order and ignored it, LOTW would have landed swiftly on the Index of Forbidden Books.