Bishop Erik Varden

What explains the remarkable rise of Bishop Erik Varden? From an atheist teenager pierced by Mahler to one of the Church’s most influential writers, his theology offers a compelling vision of the human person, the Cross, and the longing for God In recent times, few Catholic voices have attracted as much attention as Bishop Erik Varden. A Trappist monk, a convert to the Catholic faith from atheism, former Abbot of Mount Saint Bernard Abbey, and now Bishop of Trondheim, Varden is one of the Church’s most prominent writers. His theological contribution received papal recognition when Pope Leo XIV personally invited him to preach the annual Lenten retreat to the Roman Curia, later published as Alight with Hidden Glory . Varden’s growing popularity, however, is not only the result of his appointment to the episcopacy or his invitation from the Holy Father. At a time when many are thirsting for spiritual nourishment, his conferences, interviews and retreats have found a wide audience. Drawing upon Scripture, the Fathers of the Church and contemporary culture, Varden synthesises these influences into a fluid, moving and compelling style of preaching, leading people into a deeper communion with Christ. Bishop Varden was born in Norway in 1974 and baptised into a Lutheran family. When reflecting on the “seeds of his vocation” as a young man, Varden recalls that he “was privileged to grow up in a home marked by goodness, and kindness, and generosity… It wasn’t explicitly religious, but it was always respectful” ( The Napa Institute , 2026). He then describes his outlook as a teenager: “I was very skeptical of established religion when I was fourteen… and I relished my own sense of autonomy and independence and declaring myself removed from all that.” He admits that around this time he identified himself, “with a degree of self-satisfied pride… as an agnostic and even an atheist.” There was, however, a decisive change when Varden was fifteen years old. He recounts that listening to Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 “pierced” him. “I listened to that music and it wounded me, or it revealed a wound in me. It revealed to me that I was carrying something within me that was somehow greater than I was.” This became a decisive turning point, not only because it “set” him on the path towards pursuing his education abroad, but also because it confronted him with what Aristotle calls catharsis : the ability to encounter “normally hidden emotion… [and the] depths in him or herself” (Varden, 2023, p. 14). After completing his schooling in Norway, Varden attended Atlantic College in Wales before studying Theology and Religious Studies at Cambridge. During this period, he encountered serious believers, including a Muslim roommate, who “challenged me intellectually… and encouraged me.” He also made his first visit to a Trappist monastery, an experience that both “frightened” and “haunted” him because of its “degree of radicality”. Yet it was precisely this encounter that drew him towards Catholicism, and at the age of nineteen he was received into the Catholic Church. After becoming a Catholic, Varden did not initially intend to become a monk. However, after a confessor told him, “You will be a housemaster in this place for the next 40 years of your life,” he began to reconsider his future. Having completed a doctorate in Historical Theology, he felt drawn to explore a monastic vocation and joined Mount Saint Bernard Abbey in 2002, making his solemn profession a few years later. Following his Licentiate in Sacred Theology in Rome, he was ordained to the priesthood in 2011. In 2015, he was elected Abbot of Mount Saint Bernard, becoming the first abbot born outside Britain or Ireland in the monastery’s history. His abbacy coincided with a period of renewal and growth, including the development of the monastery’s brewery and greater public engagement through retreats, conferences and writing. In 2019, Pope Francis appointed him Bishop-Prelate of Trondheim in Norway. Consecrated a bishop in 2020, Varden has continued to combine pastoral leadership with writing and preaching, becoming one of the Church’s most influential voices. Beauty, however, remained a recurring theme throughout his life. Just as Mahler’s music awakened in him a longing for transcendence, his later writings repeatedly present beauty as the means by which God wounds the heart and draws it towards Himself. At the heart of Varden’s theology lies a deeply Augustinian understanding of the human person. In a time of uncertainty both in the secular world and within the Church, Varden asks a fundamental question: what does it mean to be human? He answers this simply in Chastity : “To be human is to exist with the sense of an absence to be filled. Only in the light of our human substance’s longing for union with the divine do our lesser yearnings make sense” (Varden, 2023, p. 14). For Varden, this longing is not a defect but the mark of our humanity. As a teenager listening to Mahler’s Second Symphony , beauty awakened desire, and that desire became the beginning of faith. Human beings, Varden argues, are not self-sufficient creatures capable of finding fulfilment within themselves. Rather, they are marked by an innate longing for transcendence. If longing is the beginning of Varden’s theology, the Cross stands at its centre. Modern society, he argues, oscillates between two opposite errors: the “fetishization of woundedness” and “an effort to eliminate wounds or to keep them out of sight” (McGrath Institute for Church Life, 2025). Neither approach brings healing. The answer is found in the Crucified Christ. Reflecting on Christ’s Passion, Varden writes that His wounds “open a different dimension”, making genuine compassion possible: the ability to “lament without suffocating in our lamentation, to lament without yielding to rage, being opened instead to that literally, crucially Christian characteristic, a defining mark of the Christian condition, which is compassion.” Christ’s wounds are not erased; they become the place where divine love is revealed and where redemption is accomplished. They remain in His risen body as signs of redeeming love and His victory over death. The Christian, therefore, should not define himself by his wounds but allow them to be transformed through an encounter with the Crucified and Risen Lord. This conviction explains why hope occupies such a central place in Varden’s preaching. Redemption does not remove the suffering of human life but gives it meaning by drawing it into the mystery of Christ’s Passion, Death and Resurrection. If Varden’s theology begins with human nature, its wounds and its longing for God, it culminates in a vision of freedom. This freedom is not understood in the modern sense as the unrestricted ability to do whatever one pleases, but as the capacity to live in accordance with the way God created us. Varden notes that the word “chastity” is linked to the idea of integrity, from the Latin integer , meaning to be “of one piece”. Such integration, however, requires discipline. Varden illustrates this with the image of a dancer in Chastity : “Years of relentless labor are required to gain that seemingly effortless freedom of movement…” Just as a dancer submits to years of discipline in order to move with grace, so the Christian must undergo a process of spiritual formation in order to live according to God’s design. This discipline is not the denial of human flourishing but its necessary condition. The same theme appears in the Beatitudes, where Christ says: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” Purity of heart is therefore the gradual integration of the human person, making him capable of perceiving God, his neighbour and himself truthfully. Varden draws on Christ’s words in the Gospel of Matthew, noting that if the eye is “sound”, the whole body is full of light. The opposite of purity is not impurity but confusion, for the pure heart is not the heart that has never struggled, but the heart that has become unified in its pursuit of God. The appeal of Bishop Erik Varden lies in his ability to show that Catholic theology is not a collection of abstract ideas but the answer to the deepest longings of the human heart. Beginning with desire and restlessness, moving through the wounds of Christ, and culminating in a freedom born of hope, his theology presents the Christian life as the gradual restoration of the human person. In a time marked by fragmentation, anxiety and instability, it is a vision that is intellectually rigorous, spiritually rich and profoundly beautiful.

More than 250 attendees gathered in London at the end of last month for the St Patrick’s Summit in Soho. Titled ‘Freedom of the Heart’, the event was centred on using monastic wisdom for everyday life and was hosted for young Catholics feeling the pressures of modern secular life. The summit brought together Bishop Erik […] More than 250 attendees gathered in London at the end of last month for the St Patrick’s Summit in Soho. Titled ‘Freedom of the Heart’, the event was centred on using monastic wisdom for everyday life and was hosted for young Catholics feeling the pressures of modern secular life. The summit brought together Bishop Erik Varden and Father Jacques Philippe, two of the most popular writers in the Church today. Bishop Erik Varden was born in Norway in 1974 and was baptised into a Lutheran family. In his teenage years, however, he declared himself an atheist “with a degree of self-satisfied pride and a degree of vanity”. At around the age of 15, he experienced what he later described as an “awakening of the supernatural” through music and beauty. Received into the Catholic Church while studying theology at the University of Cambridge, he later entered the Trappist monastery of Mount Saint Bernard Abbey in 2002. Ordained priest in 2011, elected abbot in 2015 and appointed Bishop of Trondheim in 2019 by Pope Francis, Bishop Varden has gained a wide readership for his ability to present the wisdom of the monastic tradition and the Desert Fathers through a contemporary lens. He was was also invited personally by Pope Leo XIV to preach the Lenten Retreat in the Vatican, during which he spoke on St Bernard of Clairvaux. Father Jacques Philippe was born in Lorraine, France, in 1947. After studying mathematics and spending several years teaching, he joined the Community of the Beatitudes in 1976 and was ordained a priest in 1985. He spent several years in Jerusalem and Nazareth studying Hebrew and the Jewish roots of Christianity, and also studied theology and canon law in Rome. A prolific author, Philippe has sold more than one million books in 24 languages, including Interior Freedom and Time for God. He has become internationally known for presenting the teachings of spiritual masters such as St John of the Cross and St Teresa of Avila in a simple and practical way. In Bishop Varden’s keynote address, ‘Purity of Heart and the Unity of Life’, he reflected on the Christian understanding of freedom as the ordering of the whole person towards God in unity. Drawing from Scripture and the monastic tradition, he argued that purity of heart is not something “repressive”, but integrated: the healing of our desires so that life becomes centred on love. Referencing the Beatitude, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God”, and drawing on themes from his book Chastity: Reconciliation of the Senses , Bishop Varden suggested that modern society often misunderstands freedom as liberation from constraints. The Christian notion of freedom, however, is “about enabling commitment. Christ came to make the two one… Christianity entertains hope of transcending human dichotomies… through a transfiguration in love that realises our thirst for infinity through graced communion with Infinite Being.” Bishop Varden suggested that modern society misunderstands the role of celibacy, viewing it through a negative lens, as though it were merely the absence of sexuality. Drawing from the teaching of the Church, such as St John Paul II’s Pastores Dabo Vobis , he highlighted that celibacy and chastity have a thoroughly positive reality. The desires and longings that we naturally have are to be fulfilled directly by God himself, through contemplation in this life and the beatific vision in the next. Bishop Varden also noted the growing difficulty young people face in forming deep relationships, suggesting that beneath this lies a broader crisis of desire and purpose. Throughout the talk, Bishop Varden returned to the theme of contemplation, citing St Bruno of Cologne and the maxim “ubi amor, ibi oculus” (where the love is, there the eye is also). What people love ultimately determines how they see reality. True freedom consists not in self-assertion, but in learning to live in a manner “disarmed” before God and our neighbours. Echoing themes from Pope Leo XIV, Bishop Varden spoke of a “chastity of society” capable of overcoming division. He concluded with the image of water being transformed into wine, suggesting that grace does not destroy human nature, but elevates it, making us “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). Father Jacques Philippe’s keynote, titled ‘Interior Freedom and the Healing of Desire’, explored the same Beatitude: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” Purity of heart is not something reserved for spiritual elites but is attainable for all, even the “fragile and wounded”, through a life of prayer, hope and perseverance in God’s grace. Using the story of Elijah, Fr Philippe contrasted purity as worship of the living God with impurity as worship of idols. An impure heart is divided among competing loves, but a pure heart is wholly oriented towards God. Fr Philippe also emphasised the thought of St John of the Cross that even the smallest acts performed with genuine love are far greater than all other works performed without charity. Fr Philippe made the theological virtue of hope a centrepiece of his address. Hope enables Christians to continue seeking holiness despite their weaknesses. He cited St Teresa of Avila’s determination and encouraged the audience not to be discouraged by setbacks, but to persevere with confidence in God’s mercy. He then turned to St Thérèse of Lisieux, whose ‘Little Way’ allowed her to “see the gentle face of Jesus” and allowed Him to work within her. Thanksgiving for the graces received makes us pure and “not self-centred”, and frees the Christian from excessive self-preoccupation. The keynotes were followed by a joint discussion and Q&A between Bishop Varden and Fr Philippe on living these principles daily. When asked where the journey towards purity of heart begins, Bishop Varden suggested honest questions: “Where am I fragmented? Where am I stuck?” He referenced Christ’s encounter with the paralytic, noting that healing begins with the willingness to answer the Lord’s question: “Do you want to be healed?” Fr Philippe emphasised the supernatural means of the Christian life, such as the sacraments, but also natural means, such as asking for help. “This can be difficult,” he noted, but is very important. The audience also asked about their relationship with screens and modern distractions, during which both speakers spoke of the importance of real-life friendship and praying together in person. Fr Philippe remarked that “it is beautiful to be together”, allowing real human relationships to be lived out. The summit also included Mass, shared meals and talks from the Dominican Sisters of St Joseph, where Sister Carino O.P. reflected on how “a rule of life” rooted in prayer, work and rest can help Christians find greater freedom. At this time in the Church and in modern society, when many young people are searching for meaning amid distraction, isolation and spiritual uncertainty, St Patrick’s Summit offers something rare: a vision of Christian freedom rooted in prayer, friendship, healing and communion with Jesus Christ. The strong attendance, together with previous talks that have attracted thousands of views on YouTube, shows that the hunger for the spiritual life remains very much alive, and that churches like St Patrick’s can be a cornerstone in fostering it.