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.
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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