A gifted novelist, essayist, and evangelizer, Robert Hugh Benson was born the youngest son of Edward White Benson and his wife Mary. Edward was an English Anglican priest. The Bensons had two other sons, Edward Frederic and Andrew Christopher. “Hugh”, as his family called him, was born November 18, 1871, at the height of the Victorian era. He had the best English education that money could buy, Eton School, for the children of prominent society and Trinity College at Cambridge. Here, he fit into the upper-class society which looked down on Roman Catholicism. It was just too suspect to consider truthful.
Hugh became aware of a personal religion only after leaving Eton. This came to him as he attended worship services at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. The music and style of worship spoke to him.
Yet, after going to Cambridge, Hugh became indecisive about spiritual matters. Despite this, he decided to join the “family business”, that of being an Anglican clergyman. After all, his father, by this time, had become Archbishop of Canterbury. The archbishop ordained his own son in 1895.
The following year, Archbishop Benson died suddenly, apparently sending Hugh into an emotional tailspin. To help him recover, Hugh went to the Middle East. As he toured the origins of Christianity, he began to question the status of the Church of England. It was so small compared to the Church of Rome. On his return home, he moved to the High Church tradition, much closer in tradition to the Roman Church. A few years later Hugh became interested in the Community of the Resurrection, an Anglican order. To calm his continuing concerns about the Roman Catholic Church, Hugh became a professed member of the order in 1901.
Along with his brothers, Hugh wrote ghost stories for entertainment. But, as he got more mature, his writing became more serious and his research became deeper. By 1902, he saw many conflicting claims between the Anglicans and the Romans. he found it impossible to justify the arguments on an intellectual level. He could not tell which of the theologians he should believe. He developed the theory that the true Church should be discoverable by anyone, even not so clever common people. He felt that humility and singleness of motive would be the most important elements of a person’s search. These he stressed in his early book, “The Religion of the Plain Man”.
What pulled him into the Roman Catholic Church, finally, was a study of Catholic claims in light of the New Testament. He was received into the Church in September 1903. Hugh was the first son of an Anglican archbishop to convert in 300 years. It made quite a sensation in the newspapers and among gossips. Hugh went to Rome to study, being ordained in June 1904. His first assignment was as pastor to the Catholic students at Cambridge, his alma mater.
Since the assignment was not overwhelmingly busy, Fr. Hugh could concentrate on his writing and on a new organization, the Catholic Missionary Society, which had been formed in 1903. This society was founded to convert England and Wales back to Catholicism. The focus was on non-Catholics rather than non-Christians. Later, it turned its focus to lapsed Catholics. Fr. Hugh had the honor of running the first motor chapel, inaugurated in 1911. He published several historical fiction novels, “By What Authority” and “The King’s Achievement” soon after his ordination. These books explored the religious controversies of the Reformation, especially in England.
In 1907, Benson published a dark look at the future, “Lord of the World”, his most famous work. The next year, he received permission to retire from pastoral work and concentrate on preaching and writing. He became an even more famous preacher, giving Lenten sermons in both Rome and the US, alternating years. These, along with his novels, with a new one coming out every year, led to many conversions. In his later novels, Benson wrote of current times, discussing problems in living up to the practice of Catholicism and the search for truth in a sinful world.
Fr. Benson drew thousands to the Church by his description of the Church as a fixed item in changing times. Catholic readers saw characters who were strong in their faith and willing to stand for the supernatural life of grace in the soul. Commentator Ann Applegarth describes his attitude thus: He was “filled with joyous zeal and the gratitude of one who has found the pearl of great price and bought it.”
He was truly a modern evangelist!
© Debbie McCoy, 2016
Debbie McCoy
Debra Booton McCoy is a cradle Catholic and is a native of central New York. She works in the health care field and spends her spare time writing and enjoying her family, two grown children, and husband Bob. Debra is a published author, having written a column for a women’s monthly newspaper in the mid-1990s and published her first book in 2014, an edited version of a French book from the 1800s, “A Catholic Mother Speaks to Her Children” by Marie, Countess de Flavigny. This is an advice book for children. She is finishing the edit of “Conferences for Boys”, by Fr. Reynauld Kuehnel, the first of four books by this priest. Debra started a Catholic publishing company in 2013, Lanternarius Press, with the purpose of adding another moral compass to print media.You can visit her website at lanternariuspress.net or visit Lanternarius Press on Facebook
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