Cistercian Bishop Erik Varden, once converted by Mahler, speaks on post-secular Europe, the limits of ideology, chastity, loneliness, and why young people are listening again
Newsroom (11/12/2025 Gaudium Press ) When the phone rang in 2019, Dom Erik Varden was living the hidden life of prayer he had chosen decades earlier as a Cistercian monk. The call from Rome informed him that the see of Trondheim – vacant for more than ten years – was now his. Few episcopal appointments have felt more like a rupture: from the silence of the cloister to one of the most public roles in Scandinavian Catholicism.
Yet rupture is not new to Varden. As a teenager he was stopped in his tracks by the final movement of Mahler’s Second Symphony – the “Resurrection” – and found himself, unexpectedly, converted. That early sensitivity to beauty has never left him. It is audible in the precise, cultured cadences of his blog Coram Fratribus and palpable in books whose titles alone – The Explosion of Loneliness, Chastity, On Christian Conversion, Wounds That Heal – read like a spiritual stethoscope pressed against the chest of late modernity.
Speaking recently in a calm, deliberate voice marked by both monastic stillness and a wry Cambridge-educated humour, Varden argued that Europe has already entered a post-secular era. “I’ve said that in a couple of conversations over the past year,” he noted. “And I think we see it quite clearly in Northern Europe.”
The old secularisation thesis – religion gently fading into private irrelevance – has not survived contact with reality. What has emerged instead is a landscape of rapid cultural change in which institutional Christianity is only one voice among many, yet a voice that some, especially the young, are listening to again.
Varden is wary of tidy categories. Asked about the rise of so-called traditionalist movements within Catholicism – often linked to the Latin Mass and a search for liturgical beauty – he refuses the usual culture-war framing. “As long as we keep insisting on pigeonholing people into narrow categories, we’re simply not going to understand what’s going on,” he said, pointing to the annual Chartres pilgrimage where participants defy caricature: some attend charismatic prayer meetings on Saturday, Latin Mass on Sunday, and serve the poor with Caritas on Monday.
The progressive-versus-conservative narrative, he insists, is a “subversion we should undermine gently, kindly, and perhaps even with humour.” He cites the German Benedictine Elmar Salmann, who, after decades of being labelled, declared: “I prefer to think of myself as both a classicist and a liberator.”
Varden is equally alert to the dangers of faith being instrumentalized for political ends. “There are certainly actors who want to claim [Christianity] as a political identity,” he acknowledged. “We must be very careful about the instrumentalization of Christian symbols and Christian vocabulary, and all this rhetoric of a clash of civilizations.” Faith, he repeated, “should illuminate, enrich and deepen the secular sphere, but it cannot be taken hostage by it.”
The Church’s own language, he believes, is its greatest untapped resource. Too often in recent decades Catholics have chased cultural relevance by mimicking the world’s idioms – “trying to catch up, learning to speak the way it speaks, even getting involved with TikTok and Instagram.” The result, Varden warned, is self-condemnation to perpetual belatedness. “But if we speak our own language – the language of Scripture, the language of the liturgy, the language of the sacraments – we can say amazingly fresh, original, and beautiful things. And people do listen.”
Evidence, he says, is not hard to find. Three years after the publication of his book Chastity, letters and emails still arrive daily; auditoriums of young people in Oslo, Lisbon, and Washington fill to hear a monk-bishop speak about desire, the body, and the redemption of loneliness. In Portugal The Explosion of Loneliness and Chastity were published as a single volume – a pairing Varden finds entirely natural, since both address “what it means to be human.”
Ancient texts, too, retain their power to startle. In his latest work Varden returns to the Epic of Gilgamesh, describing its protagonist – megalomaniac, obsessed with death, perplexed by the heart’s longing – as a mirror for contemporary men and women. “It’s simply wonderful,” he said, “to point to this text, almost 3,000 years old, and say, ‘Well, look at that guy. He’s just like you.’”
Literature, in this view, can save lives by reminding readers they are not the first to feel what they feel. Music, Varden adds, comes even closer to eternity, expressing what words cannot. And the Desert Fathers – whose sayings he has been serialising online – still offer realism, self-irony, and a sense of proportion that cuts through ideological noise.
Asked what most prevents modern people from encountering God, Varden answered without hesitation: “Truly believing that we are loved.” Asked what he most wants humanity to grasp about itself today, he replied: “Its potential for eternal life.”
In an age of collapsing certainties – political, cultural, ecological – people are searching, he said, for “benchmarks that promise to withstand the flood.” Some sceptics dismiss renewed interest in Catholicism as mere clutching at a life raft. Varden, who says he encounters genuine conversions almost daily, demurred. “Such a claim,” he said quietly, “is not supported by empirical evidence.”
- Raju Hasmukh with files from www.aceprensa.com
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