benson

Reproduced below are two quotes from Wikipedia. Robert H. Benson was one of three sons of the Archbishop of Canterbury and an Anglican priest who was received into the Church in 1903. He was ordained a Catholic priest in 1904. Last month, one of my students and I read his ghost story, "The Watcher." I slightly edited the Wikipedia quotes to fix grammar problems.

Before 1911, Benson speculated about the year 2007. "… the Anglican Church and other Protestant denominations have crumbled and disappeared under a rising tide of secularism and atheism, leaving an embattled Catholic Church as the sole champion of Christian truth. Nations are armed with weapons that can destroy a whole city from the air within minutes."

In The Dawn of All, published in 1911, he imagined, "a 1971 in which the Catholic Church has emerged victorious in England and worldwide after Germany and Austria have won the "Emperor War" of 1914. This book is also notable in its fairly accurate prediction of a global network of passenger air travel."

Prescient prognosticator?

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