We Need to Know Where We Are Going

An interview with Bishop Erik Varden by Carl E. Olson

Bishop Erik Varden was born in Norway in 1974, into a non-practicing Lutheran family, and entered the Catholic Church in June 1993. In 2002, after ten years of study at the University of Cambridge, he joined Mount Saint Bernard Abbey in Charnwood Forest. In 2002 he was admitted to Mount St Bernard Abbey, a Trappist monastery in Leicestershire, England. He has a Licentiate of Sacred Theology from the Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome, and was ordained a priest in July 2011. Pope Francis named him bishop of Trondheim in 2019.

Bishop Varden is the author of numerous essays and several books, including The Shattering of Loneliness: On Christian Remembrance and Chastity: Reconciliation of the Senses. He corresponded recently about conversion, Catholicism in Norway and the United States, chastity, synodality, and more.

WWNN: In The Shattering of Loneliness: On Christian Remembrance, you write: “The mystery of God was made manifest to me in veiled ways, densely embodied. I have lived my way from one stage of awareness to the next.” With that in mind, can you share a bit about your conversion and your journey to and into the Catholic Church? What were some essential moments, insights, and decisions?

Bishop Varden: A conversion is necessarily unfinished business. I am still praying that mine may begin in earnest.

The opening to faith happened through an experience of transcendence mediated through music. My journey into the Catholic Church proceeded gradually through my late teens. Some important guideposts were books; others were credible believers.

The discovery of the Church’s liturgy was essentially important. I was struck by the sheer objectivity of the mystery celebrated, and relieved to find that there was a pedagogy of prayer laid out for me to follow. I bought my first breviary at eighteen. It filled me with delight, as it still does.

The decision to ask to be received into the Church came entirely naturally. It never felt like a rupture; it was a matter of coming into my own, in every sense of that phrase, while I was conscious, at the same time, of encountering an utter otherness beckoning hospitably to me. I look back on this process with gratitude. 

WWNN: In Entering the Twofold Mystery, your book on conversion, you describe conversion as turning towards God, “to do his will and to strive to live in his presence. As such, it is a process with ethical implications.” In your experience and from your reflections on the world today, what are the most significant obstacles to conversion? And what are some of the more difficult ethical and moral implications faced by 21st-century converts in the West?

Bishop Varden: A conversion is fundamentally a ‘turning round.’ It begins with self-questioning, and with the intimate sense that somewhere, somehow I am being called to more, to live differently.

The chief obstacle to such turning is the self-affirmation that stops my inward ear to any voice except ones affirming me in what I am. It is significant that our cultural and political, to some extent even our ecclesiastical discourse easily becomes an echo chamber of such voices. Think of the various ways in which we expect ourselves to be “celebrated,” these days a ubiquitous word, which by no means occurs only in secular contexts. By staying caught up in myself, shut off from others, cultivating a subjective worldview, I switch off the receiver and only transmit, be it in inward monologues or dreary social media posts.

Digital gadgetry has equipped us extraordinarily for what the French call a dialogue de sourds, a dialogue of deaf people endlessly speaking past one another. The result? The construction of dividing walls and the burning of bridges.

That is why I like to insist on the pontifical, that is, bridge-building mission of Catholics. The biblical narrative, and later the history of the Church, is the account of the coming into being of a people out of scattered individuals oriented by conscience and grace towards a shared goal, infinitely attractive. Pursuit of that goal presupposes self-transcendence; at the same time, it enables entry into communion.

I’d say the principal ethical and moral challenge for converts, recent or seasoned, lies here. It is one thing notionally to acknowledge a high ideal; it is another to order my concrete relationships and choices in such a way that they correspond to that ideal and help me approach it.

WWNN: Trondheim, Norway, where you are, is one of the larger urban areas in Norway. But the Catholic population is very small, less than 2%. How would you describe the situation of the Catholic Church there? And what are the challenges—both overarching and day-to-day—in being a Catholic bishop and abbot in Norway?

Bishop Varden: Numerically, as you say, the Church is small. However, it is vibrant, young, and wonderfully variegated. The prelature of Trondheim has Catholics from 130 nations. It is remarkable to find such a manifestation of the Church’s catholicity in the extreme diaspora.

Also, the configuration of Catholicism within the ecclesiastical landscape is changing. For a long time, the Norwegian Catholic Church was a marginal phenomenon. It understood itself more or less as a refrigerator designed for the preservation of exotic fruit. That is no longer the case. With the marginalization of faith in society, and with the weakening of other faith communities, we are awakened to our task to be Christian witnesses, to spread the Gospel abroad, to ensure that Christ is present in our land.

The radical secularization of the past few decades has caused widespread forgetfulness—it takes no more than a generation and a half for a residual religious identity to fade. When I grew up in the 80s, most people thought they knew what Christianity was. That is so no longer; and there is no embarrassment associated with ignorance.

This is a cultural loss. At the same time it is an advantage for evangelization. For it is possible, now, to present the Gospel in its newness and for it to be perceived as new, fresh. We have a great task on our hands, an exacting and joyful task. It has several aspects that must be developed simultaneously. We need to find ways of communicating authentic Catholic teaching; we must teach people to pray, letting them discover the riches of the liturgy; we must show that Catholics have constructive, attractive contributions to make in politics and culture; and we must make our faith concrete in charitable work, for even though Norway is an affluent country, there is no shortage of people in need. 

WWNN: Here in the Church in the U.S., there is much focus on disagreements over liturgy, life issues, immigration, and education, among other issues. Is that similar to or different from Scandinavian countries and Europe, in your estimation? What do you see when you look at the Church in the U.S.?

Bishop Varden: I do not know the Church in the U.S. well enough to comment on it with any degree of authority. What I am most conscious of, seeing it from afar, is not so much its disagreements as its evident vitality, even a sense of rebirth evidenced in solid new vocations, in a vibrant intellectual life, in various forms of apostolic enterprise.

Of course, to live intensely within the Church is to be confronted with a range of sensibilities and convictions. These can be challenging, and tiresome; but we can mostly cope with them as long as we are rooted together in essentials. That is why I think it is crucial to keep affirming these essentials. We shall do this effectively by following the Second Vatican Council’s great watchword, “Return to the sources!”—by reading the Scriptures perseveringly, with understanding and humility; by studying the Church’s Catechism, an amazing treasure chest; by attending to the witness of the saints; and by testing our every intuition by Christ’s stated intention, uttered on the night before he suffered: “That they all may be one.”

WWNN: Synodality has been a big topic in the Church in recent years, with the recent month-long meeting on the topic in Rome. What is your understanding of synodality? What do you make of this ongoing focus on synodality, and what do you think may come of it?

Bishop Varden: I dare say we may all be a bit tired of hearing the word “synodality.” Any single term bandied about for a continuous period of time risks sounding hollow.

A synodos is literally “a way pursued together.” It stands for fellowship in movement towards a shared goal. There is no particular virtue in just being on the way; it has to lead somewhere.

We need to know where we are going. For us Christians the humble, everyday word “Way” has rich resonances. The first disciples of Jesus spoke of the Church simply as “the Way.” This was how others spoke about them, too. Towards the end of Acts, when St Paul presents a potted CV to a crowd gathered in Jerusalem, he confesses that, before he encountered the risen Christ, he “persecuted this Way up to the point of death by binding both men and women and putting them in prison.” Christians were perceived as a compact group that followed an itinerary different to that of most other people. This was considered a dangerous provocation.

Now that the formal synod has apparently come to a conclusion, we can look back over its achievements and ask: Am I strengthened in my resolve to follow Christ’s way whole-heartedly? If so, will I implement it by engaging more fully in my parish or community? Is our way recognizably distinct from the world’s way? Do we follow it on Christ’s terms, that is, by walking as he walked, taking up our own cross?

WWNN: I’ve enjoyed all of your books, but I think your most recent, on chastity, is especially insightful and challenging. Is it correct to say that the current crisis regarding sexuality is both anthropological and eschatological? What is a Christocentric approach to sexuality so vital on both the personal level and in the social/cultural realm?

Bishop Varden: Yes, I think that is correct. The crisis regarding sexuality is symptomatic of a deeper crisis, regarding what it means to be a human being; and this springs from a more fundamental perplexity regarding the finality of human existence, and of reality as such.

And so I think that a Catholic response to current discourse about sexuality must do more than just volunteer moral verdicts—or indulge in outrage. We shall have a good word to say if we underpin our argument based on the solidity and wealth of our heritage, asking “Who are we? Where do we come from and where are we going?” It is my experience that these questions resonate deeply with our times and that we, by posing them, can engage our contemporaries, be they atheists, in genuine conversation, displaying the intelligibility and the attractiveness of the Christian position.

A Christocentric approach to sexuality is conscious of Christ as the Alpha and Omega of the human condition. It will remember that we are made in God’s image in order to become like God; that our immediate, embodied, sensual, and affective desires are sparks of a more essential flame drawing us towards communion with uncreated Light, to “the full Godhead’s burning,” as Elizabeth Barrett Browning put it in an ardent poem. No other categories are sufficient to account for the intensity of longing that inhabits men and women aspiring to be fully alive.

Our secular establishment has no access to these categories. Therefore we, as Christians, have a responsibility to represent them responsibly and well. 

WWNN: In conclusion, two interrelated questions. For those who are not Catholic or Christian, why be Catholic and Christian? And for those who are Catholic, what signs of hope do you see in the Church today? How best to grow more deeply in faith, hope, and love?

Bishop Varden: Why be a Catholic? Because what the faith teaches is true, and because the truth sets us free. To rediscover the true sense of freedom is a capital task now, when the notion “freedom” is often instrumentalized rhetorically, amputated from its foundation in truth.

As for signs of hope in the Church, I see an immense array, alive in charity and goodness. I am heartened by the sincerity of many young seekers, impelled by our world’s evident frailties to seek coordinates that last. We grow in the cardinal virtues by staking our existence on them, by living them out, not only in occasional public gestures, but in the humble quotidian reality of our lives. We recognize, then, the truth of the Lord’s great parables of the mustard seed, of the leaven in the dough.

WWNN: Any final thoughts?

Bishop Varden: I have recently engaged a great deal with the legacy of Blessed Jurgis Matulaitis, a great Lithuanian confessor who died in 1927. He wrote in his diary: “Lord, let me be a dishrag in your Church, fit to wipe up messes and then to be thrown away into some dark corner. I want to be used and worn out like this so that your house may be a little cleaner and brighter.”

These days, when a worldly tendency would recast the Christian vocation triumphalistically in terms of culture wars, we need this perspective. It challenges us to devote ourselves faithfully to Christ’s ongoing salvific work, to let ourselves be used where we are needed, with no concern to be seen and praised, pursuing the good because it is good, loving it because it is loveable, sharing it because we want others to be genuinely happy.

This is how a real renewal of the Church comes about. This is how, little by little, the face of the earth is renewed.

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Carl E. Olson is editor of Catholic World Report and Ignatius Insight. He is the author of Did Jesus Really Rise from the Dead?, Will Catholics Be “Left Behind”?, co-editor/contributor to Called To Be the Children of God, and author of the “Catholicism” and “Priest Prophet King” Study Guides for Bishop Robert Barron’s Word on Fire. His recent books on Lent and Advent—Praying the Our Father in Lent and Prepare the Way of the Lord—are published by Catholic Truth Society. Follow him on Twitter @carleolson.