In Robert Hugh Benson increasingly prophetic dystopian novel, Lord of the World, euthanasia plays a recurring role in defining the collapse of Christian civilization and the rise of a totalitarian state. As Oliver Brand mockingly says to his wife, Mabel, after she has seen a man be euthanized after being injured by the fall of a flying contraption called a volor, “you know in your heart that the euthanatisers are the real priests. Of course you do.”
Of course she does? Oliver is far too presumptive. Mabel’s dilemma over that statement continues to haunt her, right up to her own death by despair that she quietly arranges after slipping away from her husband’s gaze so he had no ability to intervene.
Benson’s inclusion of euthanasia in this dark tale can be read as a sort of cultural “biomarker” of a civilization in extremis. It is fatidic evidence that warning about a slippery slope isn’t a hyperbolic threat, but an apt metaphor of what happens when a civilization decides to take its citizens’ deaths into its own hands.
Statistics speak
The Netherlands was the first to legalize killing its citizens in April 2001 and we know where that has led. Canada, whose Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) program only began in 2016, is now facing scrutiny because they have discovered that by 2022 it had become their fifth leading cause of death! By that year, Canada had reported that 44,958 people had died through their MAiD program. So much for the promise that the program would be limited and rare. Can these programs ever remain limited and rare?
Of the three scenes involving euthanasia in Lord of the World, the one mentioned above was the first. Just before the “euthanatisers,” appeared, Mabel saw a priest rush in to offer last rites to the dying man. Dazed and traumatized by the event, she said that she
“watched almost unintelligently the grey-haired young priest on his knees, with his coat torn open, and a crucifix out; she saw him bend close, wave his hand in a swift sign, and heard a murmur of a language she did not know. Then he was up again, holding the crucifix before him, and she saw him begin to move forward into the midst of the red-flooded pavement”
Mabel later recounted the horrific scene to her husband, Oliver, and especially about the priest who suddenly appeared to minister to the dying man. She asked him if people “really believe all that?” Oliver, being a devout atheist and a man of the state, mocked the idea. He told her that “people will believe anything if they begin early enough.” She knew the dying man really did believe it. She told Oliver, “I saw his eyes.”
Mabel had never seen death before. Neither had Oliver. Benson insinuates that state had provided an escape from witnessing the messiness of dying. The euthanatisers were summoned as the end drew near to shelter them from its brutal reality. Mabel’s traumatic memory of seeing death in such a dramatic way — and especially the juxtaposition of the priest and the euthanatisers within the same scene — continues to haunt her throughout the novel. Forbidden questions of whether or not God might truly exist plague her within her atheistic home and totalitarian state, and especially the implications those questions raise regarding the meaning of life and death.
Those who have read the novel know that Mabel’s mental anguish will eventually lead her to surrender her own life to the euthanatisers. The haunting God question leads her to despair over the growing menace of the state, her husband’s ascending role in its governance, and her own inability to resolve her place in the midst of it all. Her despair progresses from witnessing the consolation of the Church ministered to a dying man at the volor incident, to calling in the euthanitisers to end her mother-in-law’s life against her will. As she tells Oliver, “She [his mother] resisted, but I knew you would wish it.”
Mabel’s journey from questioning to acceptance and engagement is no doubt a common one for people today who feel compelled by the culture of death to accept its nihilistic solutions to life’s discomforts. Mabel’s questions about death and religion tested her, but the state and her husband offered no place for those questions. She reconciles herself to her husband’s influence, and the pressure and confusion of the status quo that surrounded her. When life finally became too complicated and unbearable, she escaped to a private euthanasia house where she breathes in the poisonous vapors that end her life. The narrator tells us her final thoughts:
As regarded the morality of what she was doing — the relation, that is to say, which her act bore to the common life of man — she had no shadow of doubt. It was her belief, as of the whole Humanitarian world, that just as bodily pain occasionally justified this termination of life, so also did mental pain. There was a certain pitch of distress at which the individual was no longer necessary to himself or the world; it was the most charitable act that could be performed. But she had never thought in old days that that state could ever be hers; Life had been much too interesting. But it had come to this: there was no question of it.
Mabel’s path to acceptance of a death-dealing state in Benson’s dystopian fiction is alarmingly prescient. We are living within Benson’s fiction and being pressed to accept euthanasia as a humanitarian solution to bodily and mental pain — alarmingly, acceptance is increasing internationally.
So many reasons to kill
We have seen state sanctioned killing evolve from the promise of only being offered as an escape from the pain of incurable physical diseases, to mental illness (see also here), disability, homelessness, and drug addiction (also here), and even now, (if the reports are true) to Canadians who have suffered serious injury from Covid-19 vaccines.
Evidence for all of the above surfaced earlier in October 2024 when the Office of the Chief Coroner for Ontario released a report that identified some of the reasons Canadians had chosen MAiD. They included “untreated mental illness, addictions, unclear medical diagnoses, and suffering fueled by housing insecurity, poverty and social marginalization” (See here). Earlier, in 2023, the Netherlands even voted to expand their law to allow for the killing of children between one and 12 years old.
Many were stunned following a review of the application of the Netherlands’ law done at Kingston University London. It was then that it was first confirmed that individuals with disabilities had been granted state-provided death. The justification in 21% of these cases was that an individual’s intellectual disability or autism was the sole cause of their suffering. It was a major factor in another 42% of cases. In 77% of those cases social isolation and loneliness were given as reasons for the request.
What the review tragically reveals is that the Netherlands would prefer to kill disabled and lonely people rather than develop social programs to support them. In the Netherlands, like many countries in the West, only 12% of the population regularly attends a church service, so the valuable social supports offered by faith communities are disappearing. The atheistic state is clearly not an adequate replacement for the compassion freely offered by churches and religious groups to those who are suffering loneliness and isolation.
UK is next?
It appears that the U.K. may be next to step onto the slippery slope. For the moment, state-sponsored killing remains illegal in Msgr. Robert Huge Benson’s England, but polling suggests broad public support for a change. Some 76% of the general population and 80% of healthcare workers indicate that they believe “terminally ill patients should be given the freedom and protection to take the choice.” In the U.K., the government has already intervened to prohibit silent prayer near an abortion clinic. The totalitarian state is on the rise, and many appear too willing to surrender their freedom to it, so the future may already be written.
That popular level of support for such a nihilistic policy is hard to comprehend. What this cultural “biomarker” of a civilization in extremis is telling us is that wisdom, common sense, and faith are failing and that the culture of death is prevailing. The evidence of what follows once a country steps out onto the path of state-sanctioned murder and suicide of its citizens abounds. Buying the lie that a government can give anyone a right to end life is terminal in every regard. It is the death of a culture that flourishes only when it protects life and cares for its citizens. The increasingly totalitarian control over the citizenry in Benson’s dystopic vision ultimately leads to the destruction of the Church, the death of its ministers, and the elimination of any who oppose its control.
When the Church and religion are mentioned in Oliver Brand and Mabel’s conversation about state-sponsored death, Oliver tells her that “it was this hateful thing [the Church] that had so long restrained the euthanasia movement with all its splendid mercy.”
The Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales has called on Catholics to restrain the adoption of assisted suicide in their jurisdictions. Will their voices prevail, or will Parliament vote the euthanatisers as the real priests of the U.K too? Let’s pray for greater sense than that to prevail.
