While I served as abbot, it was my duty and privilege to deliver regular chapter talks. These conferences aimed to relate the community’s current concerns, hopes, and endeavours to the chapters of the Rule of St Benedict we had heard during the week. To read what is going on now in the light of a timeless ideal, asking ‘What does this mean?’, ‘Where is this taking us?’, was a helpful practice, I found. Under this tab I will try to do something similar, letting faith illumine life here and now.
In addition, Western Christians of the third millennium are coy about professing Christ as God. As a result they do not really believe that human pain has been touched by divine omnipotence for a salvific purpose.
Continue reading For quite a long time, it seems to me, the Church in Europe has been a bystander in society, either cornered or up against the wall, forced to answer for its insufficiencies or even betrayals. Such answers must be made in the name of justice, but are not enough.
Continue reading To proffer the Biblical vocation to holiness as a response to our times' predicament amounts to more than saying that we must do our very best to be very, very good.
Continue reading Belief in an incarnate God, made ‘a man like us in all things but sin’, had a profound impact on our countries' collective understanding of what it is to be human. The further this belief recedes from public life, the more humanity is under threat.
Continue reading Truly, what is needed now is more than merely a wearily doctored political agenda. What is needed is a new sense of the very notion of a polis, what is needed is a rebirth of man.
Continue reading We do not primarily speak on behalf of ourselves, of the Catholic Church, or of Catholics in Norway - we do what has always been the Church's call and task, we speak on behalf of the weakest, in this case unborn children with a personal history running to between four and five-and-half months. We speak up for them to the strong, in this case the politicians of the Storting, with a mandate to decide over life and death.
Continue reading It is immensely problematic to teach children and young people that there are ‘boys, girls, and other genders’; that there exists an ‘interior gender’; that they may happen to have been ‘born in the wrong body’; and that gender is ‘fluid’. This manner of influence may lead to confusion, insecurity, and destructive life choices for many children and young people.
Continue reading Is it not both interesting and odd that the corporate turning of attention towards the Far East of both Catholics and Protestants avid for spirituality grounded in ritualised physical discipline should have coincided with a thoroughgoing deritualisation of inherited forms of worship at home? This topic is a hot potato now, at any rate in Roman Catholic circles.
Continue reading The imminence of the millennium of St Olav's death on Stiklestad generates perplexity in Norway. What does this anniversary mean and how are we to commemorate it?
Continue reading The reality we call ‘Europe’ is not just a result of strategy, financial policy, and the convenient conveyance of merchandise; our continent is criss-crossed by the trails of pilgrims who have always known in their guts that the north and south, east and west of Europe are held together by a common centre potentially instantiated anywhere, positing, by way of a covenant, reconciliation, righteousness, and friendship among peoples as achievable aims.
Continue reading What exists, ‘the world’, exists in order to reveal ‘the Hidden One’. It is man’s singular mission to move from unseeing adoration to vision, to see God, and to make him seen, ‘as he is’.
Continue reading If the truth be told, I am sick and tired of the word 'spirituality'. In ordinary parlance it often carries no definable content.
Continue reading We may ask if the formation of community and societal justice is at all possible over time in the absence of a commonly acknowledged foundation, without a shared concept of purpose?
Continue reading Do we not still see laws as a kind of necessary evil, a pragmatic compact to prevent the tiresome, time-wasting chaos that would otherwise result wherever crowds of people mill about together on the same small plot of land, more or less high-mindedly, more or less desperately seeking to thrive?
Continue reading The Battle on Stiklestad and its impact on our nation likewise represent, considered with eyes of faith, a covenant with Wisdom. That covenant has real, contemporaneous significance for our people now.
Continue reading I am tired of moans about the lapsing of the young. If the young leave the Church, it is not on account of bad will - it is because the claims of Christians seem irrelevant to the trials that await them.
Continue reading Is it to Norway's benefit to develop legislation sentimentalising the very notion of personhood, ascribing personhood to a wanted individual but withholding recognition of personhood from one that is unwanted, and on this basis expediting that individual either towards survival or to death? We hold that it is not to Norway's benefit to develop such legislation.
Continue reading As we enter Passiontide, our eyes focus on Jesus, who is our peace, before Pontius Pilate. We are reminded that an endeavour to establish peace in our sin-sick world involves speaking truth to power.
Continue reading We are preparing the millennium of St Olav's martyrdom - for a Christian such an anniversary cannot be a matter of mere retrospect. The story and legacy to which we are heirs are constitutive of a mission.
Continue reading Is there not, in the mindset of exceptionalism regarding our time, as if it necessarily called for measures hitherto unthought-of, an implicit narcissism, a determination to prove to ourselves that we are special? The decontextualisation of the present, born of failing or spurned remembrance, can lead to catastrophic misreadings of urgent situations.
Continue reading What constitutes antisemitism is the projection of political antagonism onto a people in a dynamic touching the rawest depths of irrationality, depths at which otherwise reasonable women and men are capable of the most preposterous attitudes and deeds.
Continue reading To be a priest is not just to be trained for certain functions. To be a priest is to live an out-poured life; the essence of that life is prayer.
Continue reading Theology, known in earlier times as the regina scientiarum, ‘queen of the sciences’, is a discipline of compassion, yes, but also of intelligent precision, which cannot be reduced to an art of improvisation.
Continue reading The National Jubilee in 2030 will be focused on the renewal of our baptismal commitment as we assume responsibility for the deposit of faith entrusted to us. The process will be a function of evangelisation and will find expression through the liturgy, a renewed culture of vocation, catechesis, and charitable work.
Continue reading It does not make experiential sense to ascribe orientational autonomy to the sexual instinct, as if it were a naturally ordering force bound to align other aspects of one’s being to itself in harmonious design. Human sexuality calls out for a structure of personhood upon which to grow.
Continue reading From the mid-19th century until recently, the Catholic Church in Norway saw itself chiefly as a chaplaincy for migrants and a few converts. It rather appeared, if I may be irreverent, as a fridge designed for the preservation of exotic fruit.
Continue reading We have heard the word 'synodality' used such a lot that we have come to think it has a bearing on everything, though it is usually associated, not with an eschatological ideal but with a process of government linked to the motions of an ecclesiastical body, Vatican II. What has the call to holiness got to do with it?
Continue reading Let us not pretend to be pure spirits. We are much better than that - we are children of God.
Continue reading I think there is an immense work of bearing to be done in the Church today. I think this bearing, consciously and freely assumed, is a precondition for healing.
Continue reading These days there is a tendency abroad that seeks to reduce ‘tradition’ to a term of partisanship, something one can be either for or against. It makes no sense.
Continue reading In a world, a time, ever more marked by indifference and cynicism, hopelessness and division, it is our task to stand for something different: to point toward the Light that no darkness can overcome, to nurture good will, to let ourselves be reconciled, to enable a communion founded on trust, in peace, to bear witness that death has lost its sting, that life is meaningful and beautiful, of inviolable dignity.
Continue reading I am moved by the intention to renew our life that it might be a sign to our times. Yet hopes for a new spring have, for many of us, been unfulfilled - we find ourselves in a state that is decidedly autumnal.
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