Words on the Word
Erik Varden is a monk and bishop, born in Norway in 1974. In 2002, after ten years at the University of Cambridge, he joined Mount Saint Bernard Abbey in Charnwood Forest. Pope Francis named him bishop of Trondheim in 2019.
Please find below a selection of homilies:
Inkling of a Call The latest chronicle of St Cecilia’s Abbey in Ryde features an obituary of Sr Marie Bernard Eckhardt, who died in March after 68 years of monastic life. This intelligent woman of deep prayer, a native of Switzerland, was to the Read More
Colliander The fact that Tito Colliander has not, apart from Way of the Ascetics, been translated into English puzzles me. I consider his seven-volume suite of memoirs a work of exceptional significance. It is also very beautiful. Colliander was a consummate Read More
Going Home 
Months have passed since I had the conversation below with Jan-Heiner Tück in a cell in Pannonhalma. I just haven’t had time to translate it until now. The German original is available here, both as text and in an audio Read More
Tannhäuser ‘With Wagner’, wrote Mère Labat, ‘we are at the opposite extreme of Mozart and also of Bach, whose technical transports are always at the service of a truth that is authentic, healthy, and profound’. She did not doubt Wagner’s genius, Read More
How to see Asked to contribute to The Tablet’s annual Summer Reading supplement, I was happy to spread the word about a lovely book I took away with me on holiday: ‘Having gone (twice) to see the marvellous Zurbarán exhibition at the National Read More
Qui cantat bis orat The Black Madonna of Einsiedeln draws a million pilgrims a year. People kneel before her carrying their hopes and fears, wounds and triumphs, aspirations and disappointments. A fire on 21 April 1465 destroyed the original image. The present statue has Read More
Wise Virgins ‘The gospel offers more than a moral code. It proposes the transformation of the human person. [For St Seraphim of Sarov, this proposition is at the heart of the parable of the wise and foolish virgins (Matthew 25.1-13): the oil Read More
On Freemasonry To be a Christian is to make fundamental choices. Our speech is to be ‘Yes, yes’ or ‘No, no’ (cf. Mt 5.37), not ‘A little bit of this and a little bit of that’.
Today, on the feast of the Apostles Read More
Today, on the feast of the Apostles Read More
Inkling of a Call
The latest chronicle of St Cecilia’s Abbey in Ryde features an obituary of Sr Marie Bernard Eckhardt, who died in March after 68 years of monastic life. This intelligent woman of deep prayer, a native of Switzerland, was to the end ‘courteous, interested in everything and everybody, sometimes quite blunt in her opinions, always full of kindness’. The seed of her monastic calling was sown early. In an account written when she was just shy of 80, she traced her vocation back to an experience entertained when, aged four, she had asked her father why she had no grandfather: ‘My father explained that he had died and then went to heaven where he would remain for ever. This was called eternity and I remember lying on my bed, closing my eyes for a minute or two and then saying to myself: “No, eternity is much longer than this.” It gave me a great thrill to “play eternity”.’ How natural eternity is for a child whose mind and sensibility have been quickened by baptism. How convoluted life can become when this quickening has not taken place and the child, growing up, lacks coordinates by which to understand the infinite longing of which the human soul is by nature possessed.
Colliander
The fact that Tito Colliander has not, apart from Way of the Ascetics, been translated into English puzzles me. I consider his seven-volume suite of memoirs a work of exceptional significance. It is also very beautiful. Colliander was a consummate stylist. His language, Torsten Kälvemark has written, is ‘that of the burning beeswax-candle’s flame’. Asked whether he was devout, Colliander answered: ‘I don’t really know what that means. The tradition to which I belong doesn’t corral people, doesn’t set them apart and say, that’s a devout man, that is not; that fellow’s a Christian, that one isn’t. After all, we all stand together carrying our failures. No one can judge and condemn. The Thief had blood on his hand, yet in old Russian icons it is he, not Peter, who stands ready to receive us into Paradise.’ We can only pray, ‘Lord have mercy’. The precondition is a sense of our insufficiency. It is the only appropriate attitude we can have before Christ Jesus, ‘for we don’t give away all we possess, our faith is weak, we cannot move mountains. Yet even if our faith is weak, or we seem to have no faith at all, we can call out, ‘Lord, have mercy’. The call itself may bestow upon us the gift of faith.’
Going Home
Months have passed since I had the conversation below with Jan-Heiner Tück in a cell in Pannonhalma. I just haven’t had time to translate it until now. The German original is available here, both as text and in an audio file.
Jan-Heiner Tück: Bishop Varden, we find ourselves in the Benedictine abbey of Pannonhalma, a location we might call a ‘counter-place’. The abbey ha a large library. It is the setting of a spiritual life. What importance do monasteries like Pannonhalma have in the largely secularised societies of our time?
Erik Varden: A fundamental importance, I’d say, as places of hospitality, of prayer, of simple presence, of continuity in the midst of change. We’re in a house that was founded in the year 996. The fact that such an institution should exist in today’s Europe would, on the face of it, seem highly improbable. The fact that it does exist brings a certain stability I think we greatly need.
JHT: You have hinted at the situation in Europe. We are confronted, in the West above all, with data produced by sociologists of religion showing increasing religious indifference. What happens when people no longer sense the sort of longing we speak of in theology and in Church, when the bridge to transcendence seems in some degree to have collapsed? How do you respond to such a challenge?
EV: I’d respond first of all by sounding a little counterpoint, for I am not altogether convinced by sociological data. I think the climate of religious indifference is in the process of changing. I see a tectonic shift taking place. I think of the context in which I live and work, in Scandinavia. Our countries — Norway and Sweden in particular — are deeply secularised. I believe we can say, though, that secularisation has, where we are, come to an end, quite simply because there’s nothing left to secularise. And because secularisation in principle is no infinite process.
In what I read and in the people I encounter, I ascertain a fresh longing, a new search for meaning, for criteria of judgement, for community, for truth. The word ‘truth’, held up to scorn in certain circles, can still be called by its name. People today are looking for carefully thought-through and realistic answers, answers proposed by persons who exemplify and live out their propositions of sense and truth.
JHT: If I may further counterpoint your counterpoint with regard to findings concerning religious indifference among sociologists of religion: a recently published study by the Pew Research Centre establishes that ‘People participate in worship services less often. The importance of religion declines in their personal lives. Belonging to religion is becoming less common.’ This is said to apply especially to young people in Northern Europe. Would you still presume that the vacuum of sense, and thereby the search for religious answers, is in fact growing?
EV: While I have the greatest respect for the Pew Research Centre, I must simply say that these statements do not empirically correspond to my own observations. Not only in Norway, but also in other countries marked by persistent secularisation, I see an increase of interest in religion among the young. I observe that young people flock faithfully to carefully prepared and reverently celebrated liturgies. Naturally, I do not suggest that this is a majority phenomenon; yet the tendency is manifest and persistent.
Young people hunger for substance. They have little patience with empty, sentimental waffling. And that is a good thing.
JHT: In your book The Shattering of Loneliness you describe your own path of spiritual awakening. You were, as a baptised agnostic, confronted with the twentieth century’s experiences of negativity and suffering. This led you into a crisis. The experience of listening to Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony gave you clues by which to revisit the question of the sense of things, which then found an answer in the Church, a space of broad remembrance. Can you say something about what distressed you, then about what happened on your way into the Church as a space of remembrance?
EV: As I evoke the process, in a way that is necessarily abbreviated, in the book, it was connected with a story my father told one day at the dinner table. My father was a vet. He had just come back from a visit to a farmer he knew well. He knew this man had been in a camp during the war. It was a hot summer’s day. When my father arrived, the farmer was working shirtless outside. My father saw scars on his back, clear traces of violence. Nothing was said about it; there was nothing to say. The farmer didn’t dramatise the matter. My father, meanwhile, saw the connection between what this man had lived through and what he had suffered; and this he related simply at table, while we were eating.
I was impressed, deeply touched by this story. I must have been about nine years old. I was interested in stories about the War on account of ways in which it had impinged on my family. I was born in 1974. The end of the War wasn’t that far into the past. The War and its consequences still played a certain role in our community, in society. Still, what I had picked up in films, to some extent in books, was now embodied and made present in a man whom I did not personally know, but whom I might know.
The fact that suffering and injustice were so close to me produced something of a trauma. It caused a kind of inward wound that had to be examined and healed.
JHT: You also describe how you were reading the literature of witnesses to the Shoah — Primo Levi, Élie Wiesel, and others. One might think that the more we engage with the calculated, perfidious crimes of the twentieth century, the deeper we go into the accounts of survivors, the more we will face a sense of senselessnes that will turn into a maelstrom. It would seem more natural, then, to drift into a philosophy of the absurd or into nihilistic speculation. Yet for you that is not how things turned out. Why not?
EV: Well, to be honest, I was exposed to this tendency. I did feel a certain temptation to give in to it. I was just a young chap, 14, 15, 16 years old, but the notion of Weltschmerz wasn’t a platitude to me. It stood for something real. This was the context in which I discovered the music of Gustav Mahler, his Second Symphony, specifically that symphony’s fifth movement, wonderfully set for a massive orchestra and chorus. It begins with an evocation of the tohu wavohu of the First Day, when all is chaos. Then a rhythmic pattern is established, which forms the basis of a melodic theme. The orchestra is joined by the chorus. Then a soprano soloist starts singing. She sings a text written by Mahler himself: ‘Have faith, heart, have faith: You have not lived in vain, have not suffered in vain.’
As I said, I was an adolescent. I hadn’t lived or suffered all that much. Yet this phrase by Mahler addressed and articulated everything that had become incarnate and concrete in the old farmer’s wounds. It spoke with such evident credibility. I then knew in my innermost being: This is true! It is trustworthy.
JHT: The twofold ‘not in vain’ in Mahler’s text points towards a promise that stand for still more, as the [German] title of your book indicates: Heimweh nach Herrlichkeit [‘Homesick for Glory’]. An intense engagement with wounding, negative experience can also serve to liberate a hope against all hope that this suffering might still be vanquished. The idea of homesickness which crops up in the book title presupposes that we know where we come from, that we were once home, before we left, or lost, that home. Remembrance of our lost home is then projected forward, towards something that will help vanquish the situation in which we presently find ourselves. How can such ‘homesickness for glory’ be related to the Garden of Eden, the paradigmatic originality that we have lost, and to the Heavenly Jerusalem towards which we are moving?
EV: I’d say that the Garden of Eden stands first for communion. It represents the harmonious communion between man and woman, man and creation, man and God. The fact that we carry with us the remembrance that such communion is possible is something I regularly ascertain in pastoral work — I see it, too, in myself. That is why I think we must take longing very seriously.
Thinking about these things, I have been influenced by Athanasius of Alexandria. His reflections in his treatise On the Incarnation of the Word sets out from a categorical distinction. He draws a line between, on the one hand, man’s hedonistic desire for wellbeing and enjoyment and, on the other, his longing, precisely. Athanasius indicates that this longing can become perceptible as a call originating outside ourselves. Suddenly I am aware of a voice that says to me: ‘Please come home.’ I’ve no idea where home is! But then I find I carry the consciousness of an archaic existence, an archaic order, that addresses me as follows: ‘You are not lost or damned, you must not for ever be a stranger and a wanderer upon the earth. Somewhere, somehow, a definitive home is waiting for you. And look, someone is standing at the window, waving…’
JHT: … waiting for the wanderer to arrive at last. Athanasius was a spiritual man. It was evident to him that this longing could not be satisfied by earthly goods. He had an established inkling that there is more. Today, meanwhile, many people seem content to settle into a well-tempered bourgeois existence. They do not seem discontent with what they have and enjoy — and so I come back to what the sociologists of religion diagnose as a disappearance of religious longing. How can we begin, in such a setting, to recall the message that there’s more?
EV: I find it can be constructive to touch this notion of longing. We might ask: What do you long for? In my experience, there aren’t all that many people who would say, ‘Oh nothing, I’ve everything I could want.’
The fact that the human being is pregnant with a yearning for infinity emerges even in purely secular discourse, these days primarily in the notions of transhumanism. Face to face with death, people seek technical, digital, or medical methods by which death might be conquered. Well, that’s one way to go about it. But I notice, above all in young people, the emergence of a different attitude. One may have grown up in great prosperity without material problems, perhaps even without any too significant human problems; one may have what one desires and yet find, it isn’t enough!
This impresses me. It is a new thing that sixteen or seventeen year-olds turn up and ask, in the cathedral bookshop, in church, or in my office: ‘What’s all this about? Why do I exist? What is the meaning of my life? Do I have a significance in this world that may even exceed my own perception? Is there such a thing as ultimate sense? Does my longing for love make sense? What do you actually believe in when you confess faith in Jesus Christ?’ I find that the approach of these young people is often strictly empirical. That is to say: they’re not always motivated by a tempestuous inner awakening. They’ve simply looked closely at their parents, uncles, and aunts, who are able to buy everything they want, to live comfortably, yet are not really happy. Then they come up with these questions quite of their own accord, questions that open onto a much broader horizon of meaningfulness.
JHT: This ‘malaise of immanence’, to speak with Charles Taylor, is something others, too, notice in young people. It comes about partly because, after a long period of progress in technology and science, of increasing prosperity, todays youth are born into a time of crisis when it is obvious that not everything will carry on as it has been, when the future may turn out to be more difficult, more critical. And partly because the questions of direction present in the propositions of digital space are only unsatisfactorily explained elsewhere, so that there is new interest in religion. This prompts me to touch the theme of the Church as a space of remembrance. In The Shattering of Loneliness you speak of an apprenticeship of remembrance. A couple of chapter headings might serve to illustrate what you mean by this space of remembrance. It is opened before us through counsels such as, ‘Remember that you are dust’, ‘Remember that you were a slave in Egypt’, ‘Remember Lot’s Wife’. Also of course, and centrally, in the Eucharistic commission: ‘Do this in memory of me.’ Are these phrases, which belong to the Church’s culture of remembrance, ones you would put into the backpack of these young people setting out in search of orientation?
EV: Absolutely. I do so regularly. It is wonderful that the Church offers us a space in which we are able to confront life the way it is in fact. The Church is not a utopian space. Growth in faith and personal maturity presupposes self-knowledge grounded in realism. The monastic tradition has always insisted on this.
The inscription on the temple of Apollo in Delphi, ‘Know yourself, Gnothi seauton’, is a precondition for the process by which we learn to know and recognise the other, the definitively Other, as Lord. Through the questions it raises, the Bible offers us pedagogically a path of growth that is truly timeless, characterised by immediate relevance. That is very helpful in a world that, as you say, is so precarious.
In addition we encounter great rememberers such as Moses, Lots’ Wife, the Disciples at the Last Supper and again on the way to Emmaus — people who realise that awareness of the past enables a perspective on the future. They show us that remembrance of what has been prepares me to acknowledge without fear what is still to come, the unknown. I am helped to remain in movement even while so much is set to paralyse me.
JHT: This is ultimately the concentration of the dimension of time that comes about in the celebration of the Eucharist. There is the remembrance of the Passion of Christ, his suffering for our sake, in the Eucharist as signum rememorativum. There is the present effect of the Eucharist as a signum demonstrativum conferring grace and creating community. Then it is the aspect of the Eucharist as signum prognosticum, a foretaste of the heavenly banquet. To be homesick for glory is a way of remembering a future that will outshine and surpass all present projections…
EV: I do think this perspective, which, the way you have just described it, sounds so sublime, theoretical, even mystical, is in fact recognisable for those who participate in the Eucharistic mystery. That is why the Church’s space of remembrance, if I may return to this term, offers us a possibility of insight even when we see and understand that space as something very concrete. It points towards a new experience that shows us a way upward and outward from our world, which has become so one-dimensional.
JHT: I find it interesting that Peter Handke repeatedly speaks of Communion concretely in his work. On the one hand, he points out that the people who go to Communion are extremely different. He speaks of the ‘epiphany of the people’, astonished to note ‘the greatness and smallness of the people, of the young and the old, the clever and the halfwits, the normal and the crazy’. On the other hand, a culture of loving attention and patience thus comes about spontaneously. We let the other go first. Our customary world of acceleration is slowed down. One may sit still and be quiet without feeling embarrassed. These are precious counter-experiences, if you like, enabling the Church to be a counter-space, which exercises its own force of attraction.
EV: It can indeed be a counter-space. My Trappistine sisters on Tautra tell my something similar. On a regular basis they notice that people enter their monastery church, on a small island off the west coast of Trøndelag, simply to sit still and weep. This doesn’t mean they are all overwhelmed by grief. Simply, the church allows the opening of rooms within that have been boarded up for too long.
JHT: The wanderer, the homo viator, does have a need to see that the window is opened anew in order to point homeward, pointing towards the land we are moving towards, to keep our gaze fixed on the patria…
EV: Quite. That is the essential task of the Church: to let this homeland appear before us. And to do so credibly.
Jan-Heiner Tück: Bishop Varden, we find ourselves in the Benedictine abbey of Pannonhalma, a location we might call a ‘counter-place’. The abbey ha a large library. It is the setting of a spiritual life. What importance do monasteries like Pannonhalma have in the largely secularised societies of our time?
Erik Varden: A fundamental importance, I’d say, as places of hospitality, of prayer, of simple presence, of continuity in the midst of change. We’re in a house that was founded in the year 996. The fact that such an institution should exist in today’s Europe would, on the face of it, seem highly improbable. The fact that it does exist brings a certain stability I think we greatly need.
JHT: You have hinted at the situation in Europe. We are confronted, in the West above all, with data produced by sociologists of religion showing increasing religious indifference. What happens when people no longer sense the sort of longing we speak of in theology and in Church, when the bridge to transcendence seems in some degree to have collapsed? How do you respond to such a challenge?
EV: I’d respond first of all by sounding a little counterpoint, for I am not altogether convinced by sociological data. I think the climate of religious indifference is in the process of changing. I see a tectonic shift taking place. I think of the context in which I live and work, in Scandinavia. Our countries — Norway and Sweden in particular — are deeply secularised. I believe we can say, though, that secularisation has, where we are, come to an end, quite simply because there’s nothing left to secularise. And because secularisation in principle is no infinite process.
In what I read and in the people I encounter, I ascertain a fresh longing, a new search for meaning, for criteria of judgement, for community, for truth. The word ‘truth’, held up to scorn in certain circles, can still be called by its name. People today are looking for carefully thought-through and realistic answers, answers proposed by persons who exemplify and live out their propositions of sense and truth.
JHT: If I may further counterpoint your counterpoint with regard to findings concerning religious indifference among sociologists of religion: a recently published study by the Pew Research Centre establishes that ‘People participate in worship services less often. The importance of religion declines in their personal lives. Belonging to religion is becoming less common.’ This is said to apply especially to young people in Northern Europe. Would you still presume that the vacuum of sense, and thereby the search for religious answers, is in fact growing?
EV: While I have the greatest respect for the Pew Research Centre, I must simply say that these statements do not empirically correspond to my own observations. Not only in Norway, but also in other countries marked by persistent secularisation, I see an increase of interest in religion among the young. I observe that young people flock faithfully to carefully prepared and reverently celebrated liturgies. Naturally, I do not suggest that this is a majority phenomenon; yet the tendency is manifest and persistent.
Young people hunger for substance. They have little patience with empty, sentimental waffling. And that is a good thing.
JHT: In your book The Shattering of Loneliness you describe your own path of spiritual awakening. You were, as a baptised agnostic, confronted with the twentieth century’s experiences of negativity and suffering. This led you into a crisis. The experience of listening to Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony gave you clues by which to revisit the question of the sense of things, which then found an answer in the Church, a space of broad remembrance. Can you say something about what distressed you, then about what happened on your way into the Church as a space of remembrance?
EV: As I evoke the process, in a way that is necessarily abbreviated, in the book, it was connected with a story my father told one day at the dinner table. My father was a vet. He had just come back from a visit to a farmer he knew well. He knew this man had been in a camp during the war. It was a hot summer’s day. When my father arrived, the farmer was working shirtless outside. My father saw scars on his back, clear traces of violence. Nothing was said about it; there was nothing to say. The farmer didn’t dramatise the matter. My father, meanwhile, saw the connection between what this man had lived through and what he had suffered; and this he related simply at table, while we were eating.
I was impressed, deeply touched by this story. I must have been about nine years old. I was interested in stories about the War on account of ways in which it had impinged on my family. I was born in 1974. The end of the War wasn’t that far into the past. The War and its consequences still played a certain role in our community, in society. Still, what I had picked up in films, to some extent in books, was now embodied and made present in a man whom I did not personally know, but whom I might know.
The fact that suffering and injustice were so close to me produced something of a trauma. It caused a kind of inward wound that had to be examined and healed.
JHT: You also describe how you were reading the literature of witnesses to the Shoah — Primo Levi, Élie Wiesel, and others. One might think that the more we engage with the calculated, perfidious crimes of the twentieth century, the deeper we go into the accounts of survivors, the more we will face a sense of senselessnes that will turn into a maelstrom. It would seem more natural, then, to drift into a philosophy of the absurd or into nihilistic speculation. Yet for you that is not how things turned out. Why not?
EV: Well, to be honest, I was exposed to this tendency. I did feel a certain temptation to give in to it. I was just a young chap, 14, 15, 16 years old, but the notion of Weltschmerz wasn’t a platitude to me. It stood for something real. This was the context in which I discovered the music of Gustav Mahler, his Second Symphony, specifically that symphony’s fifth movement, wonderfully set for a massive orchestra and chorus. It begins with an evocation of the tohu wavohu of the First Day, when all is chaos. Then a rhythmic pattern is established, which forms the basis of a melodic theme. The orchestra is joined by the chorus. Then a soprano soloist starts singing. She sings a text written by Mahler himself: ‘Have faith, heart, have faith: You have not lived in vain, have not suffered in vain.’
As I said, I was an adolescent. I hadn’t lived or suffered all that much. Yet this phrase by Mahler addressed and articulated everything that had become incarnate and concrete in the old farmer’s wounds. It spoke with such evident credibility. I then knew in my innermost being: This is true! It is trustworthy.
JHT: The twofold ‘not in vain’ in Mahler’s text points towards a promise that stand for still more, as the [German] title of your book indicates: Heimweh nach Herrlichkeit [‘Homesick for Glory’]. An intense engagement with wounding, negative experience can also serve to liberate a hope against all hope that this suffering might still be vanquished. The idea of homesickness which crops up in the book title presupposes that we know where we come from, that we were once home, before we left, or lost, that home. Remembrance of our lost home is then projected forward, towards something that will help vanquish the situation in which we presently find ourselves. How can such ‘homesickness for glory’ be related to the Garden of Eden, the paradigmatic originality that we have lost, and to the Heavenly Jerusalem towards which we are moving?
EV: I’d say that the Garden of Eden stands first for communion. It represents the harmonious communion between man and woman, man and creation, man and God. The fact that we carry with us the remembrance that such communion is possible is something I regularly ascertain in pastoral work — I see it, too, in myself. That is why I think we must take longing very seriously.
Thinking about these things, I have been influenced by Athanasius of Alexandria. His reflections in his treatise On the Incarnation of the Word sets out from a categorical distinction. He draws a line between, on the one hand, man’s hedonistic desire for wellbeing and enjoyment and, on the other, his longing, precisely. Athanasius indicates that this longing can become perceptible as a call originating outside ourselves. Suddenly I am aware of a voice that says to me: ‘Please come home.’ I’ve no idea where home is! But then I find I carry the consciousness of an archaic existence, an archaic order, that addresses me as follows: ‘You are not lost or damned, you must not for ever be a stranger and a wanderer upon the earth. Somewhere, somehow, a definitive home is waiting for you. And look, someone is standing at the window, waving…’
JHT: … waiting for the wanderer to arrive at last. Athanasius was a spiritual man. It was evident to him that this longing could not be satisfied by earthly goods. He had an established inkling that there is more. Today, meanwhile, many people seem content to settle into a well-tempered bourgeois existence. They do not seem discontent with what they have and enjoy — and so I come back to what the sociologists of religion diagnose as a disappearance of religious longing. How can we begin, in such a setting, to recall the message that there’s more?
EV: I find it can be constructive to touch this notion of longing. We might ask: What do you long for? In my experience, there aren’t all that many people who would say, ‘Oh nothing, I’ve everything I could want.’
The fact that the human being is pregnant with a yearning for infinity emerges even in purely secular discourse, these days primarily in the notions of transhumanism. Face to face with death, people seek technical, digital, or medical methods by which death might be conquered. Well, that’s one way to go about it. But I notice, above all in young people, the emergence of a different attitude. One may have grown up in great prosperity without material problems, perhaps even without any too significant human problems; one may have what one desires and yet find, it isn’t enough!
This impresses me. It is a new thing that sixteen or seventeen year-olds turn up and ask, in the cathedral bookshop, in church, or in my office: ‘What’s all this about? Why do I exist? What is the meaning of my life? Do I have a significance in this world that may even exceed my own perception? Is there such a thing as ultimate sense? Does my longing for love make sense? What do you actually believe in when you confess faith in Jesus Christ?’ I find that the approach of these young people is often strictly empirical. That is to say: they’re not always motivated by a tempestuous inner awakening. They’ve simply looked closely at their parents, uncles, and aunts, who are able to buy everything they want, to live comfortably, yet are not really happy. Then they come up with these questions quite of their own accord, questions that open onto a much broader horizon of meaningfulness.
JHT: This ‘malaise of immanence’, to speak with Charles Taylor, is something others, too, notice in young people. It comes about partly because, after a long period of progress in technology and science, of increasing prosperity, todays youth are born into a time of crisis when it is obvious that not everything will carry on as it has been, when the future may turn out to be more difficult, more critical. And partly because the questions of direction present in the propositions of digital space are only unsatisfactorily explained elsewhere, so that there is new interest in religion. This prompts me to touch the theme of the Church as a space of remembrance. In The Shattering of Loneliness you speak of an apprenticeship of remembrance. A couple of chapter headings might serve to illustrate what you mean by this space of remembrance. It is opened before us through counsels such as, ‘Remember that you are dust’, ‘Remember that you were a slave in Egypt’, ‘Remember Lot’s Wife’. Also of course, and centrally, in the Eucharistic commission: ‘Do this in memory of me.’ Are these phrases, which belong to the Church’s culture of remembrance, ones you would put into the backpack of these young people setting out in search of orientation?
EV: Absolutely. I do so regularly. It is wonderful that the Church offers us a space in which we are able to confront life the way it is in fact. The Church is not a utopian space. Growth in faith and personal maturity presupposes self-knowledge grounded in realism. The monastic tradition has always insisted on this.
The inscription on the temple of Apollo in Delphi, ‘Know yourself, Gnothi seauton’, is a precondition for the process by which we learn to know and recognise the other, the definitively Other, as Lord. Through the questions it raises, the Bible offers us pedagogically a path of growth that is truly timeless, characterised by immediate relevance. That is very helpful in a world that, as you say, is so precarious.
In addition we encounter great rememberers such as Moses, Lots’ Wife, the Disciples at the Last Supper and again on the way to Emmaus — people who realise that awareness of the past enables a perspective on the future. They show us that remembrance of what has been prepares me to acknowledge without fear what is still to come, the unknown. I am helped to remain in movement even while so much is set to paralyse me.
JHT: This is ultimately the concentration of the dimension of time that comes about in the celebration of the Eucharist. There is the remembrance of the Passion of Christ, his suffering for our sake, in the Eucharist as signum rememorativum. There is the present effect of the Eucharist as a signum demonstrativum conferring grace and creating community. Then it is the aspect of the Eucharist as signum prognosticum, a foretaste of the heavenly banquet. To be homesick for glory is a way of remembering a future that will outshine and surpass all present projections…
EV: I do think this perspective, which, the way you have just described it, sounds so sublime, theoretical, even mystical, is in fact recognisable for those who participate in the Eucharistic mystery. That is why the Church’s space of remembrance, if I may return to this term, offers us a possibility of insight even when we see and understand that space as something very concrete. It points towards a new experience that shows us a way upward and outward from our world, which has become so one-dimensional.
JHT: I find it interesting that Peter Handke repeatedly speaks of Communion concretely in his work. On the one hand, he points out that the people who go to Communion are extremely different. He speaks of the ‘epiphany of the people’, astonished to note ‘the greatness and smallness of the people, of the young and the old, the clever and the halfwits, the normal and the crazy’. On the other hand, a culture of loving attention and patience thus comes about spontaneously. We let the other go first. Our customary world of acceleration is slowed down. One may sit still and be quiet without feeling embarrassed. These are precious counter-experiences, if you like, enabling the Church to be a counter-space, which exercises its own force of attraction.
EV: It can indeed be a counter-space. My Trappistine sisters on Tautra tell my something similar. On a regular basis they notice that people enter their monastery church, on a small island off the west coast of Trøndelag, simply to sit still and weep. This doesn’t mean they are all overwhelmed by grief. Simply, the church allows the opening of rooms within that have been boarded up for too long.
JHT: The wanderer, the homo viator, does have a need to see that the window is opened anew in order to point homeward, pointing towards the land we are moving towards, to keep our gaze fixed on the patria…
EV: Quite. That is the essential task of the Church: to let this homeland appear before us. And to do so credibly.
Tannhäuser
‘With Wagner’, wrote Mère Labat, ‘we are at the opposite extreme of Mozart and also of Bach, whose technical transports are always at the service of a truth that is authentic, healthy, and profound’. She did not doubt Wagner’s genius, but thought it impure, marked by a ‘pernicious commotion’ that, ‘in an overheated atmosphere of passion or false mysticism, bears a philtre capable of fettering us as magically as that which bound Tristan to Isolde.’ She has a point. Yet Wagner is capable of splendid elevation, in Tannhäuser, for example. The production running at the Zurich Opera is musically exquisite, nearing perfection. The gorgeousness Tahu Matheson speaks of here is wonderfully displayed. It’s a pity the stage director seems to have missed what the drama is about. Instead of letting the music and words speak, he introduces distracting, dull subplots, as when Landgrave Hermann and the knights come crashing in snorting cocaine, as when the Pilgrims abseil down from panels of florescent light or lie about in the snow (when it is supposed to be late summer) like dead poodles. The opera’s Christian symbolism, especially in the representation of Elisabeth – part Mary, part Solveig – is lost. Yet one can close one’s eyes and find it again. For the music does speak, and hints at grace, gloriously.
How to see
Asked to contribute to The Tablet’s annual Summer Reading supplement, I was happy to spread the word about a lovely book I took away with me on holiday: ‘Having gone (twice) to see the marvellous Zurbarán exhibition at the National Gallery, I turned to Jeremy Robbins’s Francisco de Zurbarán and the Fabric of the World. It’s a terrific read, both a monograph on Zurbarán and an introduction to the Spanish Golden Age. It is, too, a treatise on the art of seeing, which we need to practise these days, when all we seem able to do is scroll.’ ‘It is hardly surprising’, Robbins writes, ‘that certain of Zurbarán’s figures have been likened to still lifes, for the effect of his style is to render all life stilled.’ Just how illuminating and beneficial this is you can find out for yourself simply by pausing for ten minutes or so before one of the master’s painting while dropping (but really dropping) everything else.
Qui cantat bis orat
The Black Madonna of Einsiedeln draws a million pilgrims a year. People kneel before her carrying their hopes and fears, wounds and triumphs, aspirations and disappointments. A fire on 21 April 1465 destroyed the original image. The present statue has been in place since then, with the exception of a few years after the French Revolution, when the Madonna was hidden to preserve her from Revolutionary violence. One of the lovely things about staying at Einsiedeln is to hear the monastic community sing the Salve Regina before the Black Madonna after vespers. The tone is Gregorian, early medieval. The four-part harmony was written up in modern times, but bears resemblance to old devotional songs from different contexts. Listen to this Tantum ergo, for instance. The harmonies are different. The tonal quality drawn forth on a sun-scorched island is unlike that which resounds in the Alps. But somehow the sentiment is the same. It speaks of man’s spontaneous inclination to utter his soul in harmony with others, in song, beautifully. These days, when we feel the menacing vibrations of artificial intelligence, one sensible response would be to sing more.
Wise Virgins
‘The gospel offers more than a moral code. It proposes the transformation of the human person. [For St Seraphim of Sarov, this proposition is at the heart of the parable of the wise and foolish virgins (Matthew 25.1-13): the oil the virgins needed, he explains, stands for the acquisition of the Holy Spirit.] The foolish virgins did not lack virtue. On the contrary, they possessed a great deal of it and, therefore, were prone to overestimate its importance. What stood between them and wisdom was their assumption that virtue was all they needed to get access to the marriage feast: in their spiritual ignorance they supposed that the Christian life consisted merely in doing good works. ‘Having done a good deed, they said to themselves: “Hereby we have accomplished the work of God”. As for the grace of the Holy Spirit, they did not bother to acquire it.’’ From The Shattering of Loneliness.
On Freemasonry
To be a Christian is to make fundamental choices. Our speech is to be ‘Yes, yes’ or ‘No, no’ (cf. Mt 5.37), not ‘A little bit of this and a little bit of that’.
Today, on the feast of the Apostles Peter and Paul, staunch upholders of Christ’s truth who were faithful to that truth unto the shedding of their blood, the Nordic bishops are addressing to all priests of our territories a letter. It states the Church’s unambiguous teaching on freemasonry. We are obliged to tell our priests that no Catholic can be a freemason; so that our priests in turn can guide and direct the faithful with clarity and charity – for the preaching of the truth in love is a high form of charity.
Below you can find the text of the letter.
It is followed by a summary of a most precious document the German Bishops’ Conference issued in 1980 on the subject of freemasonry. We can be grateful to the German bishops for speaking so clearly, 46 years ago, about the objective truth of Catholic teaching and for denouncing as falsehood the notion that a putative ‘Copernican revolution’ had, with the Second Vatican Council, replaced the notion of objective truth with a notion of human dignity by which each individual might be thought empowered to evaluate subjectively what truth is and is not.
The truth that liberates and saves is the truth revealed by God in Christ, none else.
***
Letter of the Nordic Bishops’ Conference to Parish Priests [PDF]
ON FREEMASONRY
29 June 2026
Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul.
Dear brothers in the priesthood and in the care of souls,
Saint Paul provides valuable instruction to all those who shepherd the People of God when he writes: “proclaim the message; be persistent whether the time is favourable or unfavourable; convince, rebuke, and encourage, with the utmost patience in teaching” (2 Tim 4.2).
For us bishops, this instruction is further affirmed by the teaching of the Church, which calls us as shepherds to “bring forth from the treasury of Revelation new things and old, making it bear fruit and vigilantly warding off any errors that threaten their flock” (Lumen Gentium, 25). In fact, we are “bound to propose and explain to the faithful the truths of the faith which are to be believed and applied to morals” (CIC can. 386, §1).
We write to you at this time as shepherds to clarify a matter that for many years, if not decades, has generated uncertainty, speculation and diverging opinions in our countries: the question of whether or not Catholic faithful in the Nordic countries may be freemasons or belong to a masonic lodge.
In the light of differences sometimes perceived to exist between the various strands of freemasonry, an opinion took hold in our countries supposing that freemasons in the Nordic countries are distinct in such a way that membership might be permitted for the Catholic faithful in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden.
This supposition has given rise to many questions of a pastoral and sacramental nature.
It has caused disquiet, indeed a degree of uproar in our local churches, where many of our faithful come from countries where the Church’s teaching on freemasonry is well established.
To clarify the matter, the Nordic Conference of Bishops held a meeting with superiors and officials of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith during a plenary assembly held in Rome from 1 to 5 September 2025.
The response of the dicastery was crystal clear.
Based on that response, and to share with all the faithful, and you as their parish priests, this clarity, we the bishops of the Nordic Bishops’ Conference state and affirm together:
1. There exists no exception, no particular norm or rule, and in consequence no dispensation in the Church that distinguishes adherence to freemasonry in the Nordic countries from the provisions of the universal law of the Church.
2. Therefore, the provisions of universal law and the specific norms and guidance issued by the Apostolic See on the question of freemasonry apply in full and without exception in the territory of the Nordic Bishops’ Conference. The most recent such guidance was offered by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith in the Note for the Audience with the Holy Father of 13 November 2023, reaffirming the validity of the Declaration on Masonic Associations of 26 November 1983, issued by the then Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
We wish to stress that Catholic Church’s firmness on the question of adherence to freemasonry is not a negative judgement on the good will or good works of individuals. The Church’s position springs from awareness that the theological and philosophical principles of freemasonry are incompatible with confession of the Catholic faith.
With this in mind, the following pastoral and sacramental provisions are to be followed:
a) A Catholic, who is at the same time a freemason or a member of a masonic lodge is to be encouraged to relinquish this membership.
b) A Catholic, who is at the same time a freemason or a member of a masonic lodge is to abstain from receiving Holy Communion and is prohibited from receiving other sacraments.
c) A freemason or a member of a masonic lodge who seeks baptism in the Catholic Church, or who seeks to enter full communion with the Catholic Church as a validly baptised Christian, is to terminate this membership prior to baptism or reception into full communion.
d) No parish, no institute of consecrated life or society of apostolic life, no Catholic organisation or institution in our local churches is to enter into agreements of collaboration with freemasons or masonic lodges or make use of properties belonging to masonic lodges.
The implementation of these provisions will require patience, pastoral care and kind attention. We invite you to study the official documents that account for the Church’s position in order to expound them carefully and correctly.
We have confidence in your gifts and experience, knowing that you will be able wisely to accompany, with clarity of mind and a pastoral heart, those among the faithful who find themselves needing to terminate their bonds with freemasonry and masonic lodges.
The call of our Lord Jesus Christ, “Come, follow me” (Matt 4.19), presupposes readiness to leave behind other attachments that stand in the way of wholehearted discipleship. This has always been, and will always remain, a criterion of Christian authenticity. Let us help each other by word and example to live up to it, trusting in God’s grace.
With the assurances of our prayers for your ministry and for the faithful entrusted to your priestly care, we remain,
Yours in Christ,
+Erik Varden OCSO, President of the Nordic Bishops’ Conference
Territorial Prelate of Trondheim
Apostolic Administrator of Tromsø
+Raimo Goyarrola, Vice President of the Nordic Bishop’s Conference
Bishop of Helsinki
+David Tencer OFMCap
Bishop of Reykjavik
+Anders Cardinal Arborelius OCD
Bishop of Stockholm
+Czeslaw Kozon
Bishop of Copenhagen
+Fredrik Hansen
Bishop of Oslo
Sr. Anna Mirijam Kaschner CPS, Secretary General
***
Can Catholics be Freemasons? No
In the years 1974-80 an official process of conversation took place that involved the Catholic Church in Germany and German freemasonry. The conversation was coordinated by the German Bishops’ Conference and the United Grand Lodges of Germany. The Catholic Church was concerned to establish whether freemasonry had, in the years following World War II, changed to such an extent that Catholics might be freemasons. The conversations took place in an atmosphere marked by openness, concerned to establish facts. The Catholic Church was granted insight into the freemasons’ first three degrees.
Examination of these degrees made it clear that there remain fundamental and insuperable contradictions between the Church and freemasonry. The essence of freemasonry turns out to remain unchangeably the same. To be a freemason is to cast doubt over the whole of Christian existence. The examination of the freemasons’ rituals, ideology and self-understanding was thorough. It clearly showed that it is impossible to be a member of the Catholic Church and at the same time to be a freemason.
Reasons
1. The freemasons’ outlook on life
The freemasons’ outlook on life is not clearly defined, but it tends towards humanism. The words and gestures found in the books of rituals combine to form a frame which each individual mason can fill with personal notions. It was impossible to trace a binding shared ideology. By contrast, relativism is a fundamental conviction of freemasonry. In the Internationales Freimaurer-Lexikon one reads that ‘freemasonry is the only system that over time has managed to keep both ideology and practice far away from dogmas. Freemasonry may therefore be understood as a movement for relativistically inclined human beings in pursuit of humanistic ideals.’ This sort of subjectivism is incompatible with faith in the Word of God who revealed Himself to the world and is rightly expounded by the Church’s magisterium. Further, it confounds Catholics’ view of the Church’s sacred, sacramental actions.
2. Freemasonry’s view of truth
Freemasons deny that there is such a thing as an objective recognition of the truth. During the conversations the well-known words of G.E. Lessing were often invoked:
If God held in his right hand all truth and in his left the constant, lively urge for truth — with the stipulation that I might always, and for eternity, make a wrong choice — and then said to me, ‘Make your choice!’, I would in all humility have cast myself into his left hand and said: ‘Father, give me this! Pure truth is for you alone.’
The freemasons said in our conversations that this was most relevant for them. The proposition that all truth is relative is the foundation of freemasonry. Freemasons refuse commitment to dogma both within and outside the lodge. It is required that the freemason should be one who is ‘free from subjection to dogma and passion’. This implies a rejection in principle of any dogmatic position, as is clearly stated in the Freimaurer Lexikon: ‘All institutions based on dogma (among which the Catholic Church is most prominent) constrain people to believe.’ Such a view of truth is incompatible with the Catholic understanding of truth with regard both to natural theology and the theology of revelation.
3. The freemasons’ understanding of religion
The freemasons’ understanding of religion is relativistic. All religions are seen as competing attempts to express a divine truth that in any way can never be attained. The only apt expression of divine truth are the symbols of the freemasons, which every freemason interprets as he or she can. That is why the lodge strictly forbids religious discussion among freemasons. The constitutions, dated 1723, of the United Grand Lodge of England state in the first paragraph:
A Mason is obliged by his Tenure, to obey the moral law; and if he rightly understands the Art, he will never be a stupid atheist, nor an irreligious libertine. But though in ancient Times Masons were charged in every Country to be of the Religion of that Country or Nation, whatever it was, yet it is now thought more expedient only to oblige them to that Religion in which all Men agree, leaving their particular Opinions to themselves.
The notion of a religion ‘in which all Men agree’ presupposes a relativistic understanding of religion that is incompatible with the fundamental conviction of Christianity.
4. The freemasons understanding of god
The notion of ‘the great Architect of the universe’ is central to the rituals of freemasonry. It must be deemed a deistic notion, even where one endeavours with good will to be open to other religions. There is not, further to this, any objective recognition of the divine that allows for the understanding of a personal God. The idea of ‘the great Architect of the universe’ is neutral, open to all sorts of interpretation. Anyone can fill it with his or her own understanding of the divine, be they Christians or Muslims, Confucianists, Animists, or adherents of whatever cult. According to the freemasons, the ‘great Architect’ is not a personal God. A vague, general religious sentiment is all it takes to recognise ‘the great Architect of the universe’. The idea of a universal architect enthroned on a deistic sideline undermines Catholic faith in a God who speaks to human beings as Father and Lord.
5. The freemasons’ view of god and of revelation
All Christians believe and profess that God has revealed himself. The freemasons’ view of god excludes such belief. Talk of a ‘great Architect of the universe’ takes the relationship of humans to the divine back to a pre-deistic stage. Freemasons consider the astral primal religion of Babylonians and Sumerians a source of Christian belief. This is in flagrant opposition to a faith based on Revelation.
6. The freemasons’ understanding of tolerance
The freemasons’ view of truth also conditions their view of tolerance. A Catholic will uphold that tolerance is a matter of charitably putting up with other people. Freemasons, in contrast, are to tolerate ideas, no matter how contradictory they may be. It may be useful to cite, once again, from Lennhoff and Posner:
Relativism leads directly to the freemasons’ outlook on the world and on the problems of humankind. […] Relativism proposes reasonable arguments for tolerance. Freemasonry is a movement that, since the end of the Middle Ages, reacted against both the absolute teaching of the Church and political absolutism, and against all kinds of fanaticism.
This view of tolerance confounds fidelity to and recognition of the Church’s magisterium among Catholics.
7. The rituals of freemasonry
In the detailed conversations the rituals of the degrees of apprentices, fellows, and masters were discussed. The actions indicated in these rituals by words and symbols resemble sacraments. They give the impression that these symbolic actions objectively transform a person. The stand for a symbolic initiation set to compete with the transformation of human beings by the Church’s sacraments.
8. The perfectibility of man
The rituals show that freemasonry envisages the ethical and spiritual optimisation of the human being. In the ritual for the master’s degree one can read: ‘What virtues must a true master possess? Purity of heart, truth in speech, prudence in action, fearlessness faced with unavoidable evils and persevering zeal in good deeds.’ This kind of ethical optimisation, by being proposed as an absolute, is disconnected from God’s grace. It leaves no space for the idea of man’s justification as a Christian understands it. What is the point of Baptism, Penance, and the Eucharists, had man already been illumined and brought to conquer death through the first three degrees?
9. The spirituality of freemasonry
Freemasonry makes a total claim on the whole human being, requiring adherence in life and death. Even if one grants that the first three degrees are principally intended to form consciousness and character, it remains an open question whether the Church’s mission admits this sort of formation exercised by another institution. This total claim shows clearly that freemasonry is incompatible with the Catholic Church.
10. Different directions within freemasonry
There are within freemasonry a majority of lodges representing a humanitarian, ‘believing’ tendency. Alongside them are extreme orientations like, on the one hand, the atheistic fraternity of the ‘Grand Orient de France’ that also has lodges in Germany and, on the other hand, the ‘Große Landesloge’. The latter further calls itself ‘the Christian order of freemasonry’. So-called ‘Christian freemasonry’ is in no way outside the basic constitution of freemasonry; it is motivated simply by the wish to reconcile freemasonry with subjective Christian faith. Such a position is theologically untenable. The facts of Revelation (God’s incarnation and his communion with humankind) are recognised as one possible variant within the general outlook of freemasonry — and it is one that only a minority of freemasons will recognise.
11. Freemasonry and the Catholic Church
Different forms of freemasonry relate to the Church in different ways: some are friendly, some are neutral, some are hostile. These differences matter; but they mislead if they make people think that the membership of Catholics is impermissible only when it comes to lodges hostile to Christianity. The investigation that has been carried out has been based, precisely, on freemasonry well-disposed to the Church. Even here the incompatibility of Catholic faith and freemasonry is of a fundamental nature.
12. Freemasonry and the evangelical church
In 1973 there were conversations between freemasonry and the [German] evangelical church. The results of these conversations were presented in a final report on 13 October 1973. The representatives of the evangelical church left it to the conscience of individual Christians to evaluate the possibility of membership in freemasonry. A really remarkable point is made in the report’s fifth paragraph:
It was impossible for the church’s representatives to reach a final conclusion regarding the meaning and significance of rituals. But the question kept arising whether the rites and activities of freemasonry would not reduce the significance for the evangelical Christian of justification by grace.
Conclusion
The basic attitudes and activities of freemasons have remained exactly the same, even if persecution under Nazism led to greater openness to other societal groups. The contradictions displayed touch the very foundation of Christian life. Detailed investigation of the freemasons’ rituals and spirituality made it patently clear that simultaneous membership of the Catholic Church and of freemasonry is impossible.
[Summary of essential points from the Erklärung der Deutschen Bischofskonferenz zur Frage der Mitgliedschaft von Katholiken in der Freimaurerei from 1980]
***
Here is the above summary in PDF, with notes to relevant sources. It is followed by the German original. Another helpful reference is the volume produced by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 2015, with a preface by Cardinal Luis F. Ladaria SJ and an introduction by Cardinal Gerhard L. Müller: Dichiarazione circa le associazioni massoniche (Rome, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2015). You can also find pertinent statements by the Holy See here and here.
Today, on the feast of the Apostles Peter and Paul, staunch upholders of Christ’s truth who were faithful to that truth unto the shedding of their blood, the Nordic bishops are addressing to all priests of our territories a letter. It states the Church’s unambiguous teaching on freemasonry. We are obliged to tell our priests that no Catholic can be a freemason; so that our priests in turn can guide and direct the faithful with clarity and charity – for the preaching of the truth in love is a high form of charity.
Below you can find the text of the letter.
It is followed by a summary of a most precious document the German Bishops’ Conference issued in 1980 on the subject of freemasonry. We can be grateful to the German bishops for speaking so clearly, 46 years ago, about the objective truth of Catholic teaching and for denouncing as falsehood the notion that a putative ‘Copernican revolution’ had, with the Second Vatican Council, replaced the notion of objective truth with a notion of human dignity by which each individual might be thought empowered to evaluate subjectively what truth is and is not.
The truth that liberates and saves is the truth revealed by God in Christ, none else.
***
Letter of the Nordic Bishops’ Conference to Parish Priests [PDF]
ON FREEMASONRY
29 June 2026
Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul.
Dear brothers in the priesthood and in the care of souls,
Saint Paul provides valuable instruction to all those who shepherd the People of God when he writes: “proclaim the message; be persistent whether the time is favourable or unfavourable; convince, rebuke, and encourage, with the utmost patience in teaching” (2 Tim 4.2).
For us bishops, this instruction is further affirmed by the teaching of the Church, which calls us as shepherds to “bring forth from the treasury of Revelation new things and old, making it bear fruit and vigilantly warding off any errors that threaten their flock” (Lumen Gentium, 25). In fact, we are “bound to propose and explain to the faithful the truths of the faith which are to be believed and applied to morals” (CIC can. 386, §1).
We write to you at this time as shepherds to clarify a matter that for many years, if not decades, has generated uncertainty, speculation and diverging opinions in our countries: the question of whether or not Catholic faithful in the Nordic countries may be freemasons or belong to a masonic lodge.
In the light of differences sometimes perceived to exist between the various strands of freemasonry, an opinion took hold in our countries supposing that freemasons in the Nordic countries are distinct in such a way that membership might be permitted for the Catholic faithful in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden.
This supposition has given rise to many questions of a pastoral and sacramental nature.
It has caused disquiet, indeed a degree of uproar in our local churches, where many of our faithful come from countries where the Church’s teaching on freemasonry is well established.
To clarify the matter, the Nordic Conference of Bishops held a meeting with superiors and officials of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith during a plenary assembly held in Rome from 1 to 5 September 2025.
The response of the dicastery was crystal clear.
Based on that response, and to share with all the faithful, and you as their parish priests, this clarity, we the bishops of the Nordic Bishops’ Conference state and affirm together:
1. There exists no exception, no particular norm or rule, and in consequence no dispensation in the Church that distinguishes adherence to freemasonry in the Nordic countries from the provisions of the universal law of the Church.
2. Therefore, the provisions of universal law and the specific norms and guidance issued by the Apostolic See on the question of freemasonry apply in full and without exception in the territory of the Nordic Bishops’ Conference. The most recent such guidance was offered by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith in the Note for the Audience with the Holy Father of 13 November 2023, reaffirming the validity of the Declaration on Masonic Associations of 26 November 1983, issued by the then Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
We wish to stress that Catholic Church’s firmness on the question of adherence to freemasonry is not a negative judgement on the good will or good works of individuals. The Church’s position springs from awareness that the theological and philosophical principles of freemasonry are incompatible with confession of the Catholic faith.
With this in mind, the following pastoral and sacramental provisions are to be followed:
a) A Catholic, who is at the same time a freemason or a member of a masonic lodge is to be encouraged to relinquish this membership.
b) A Catholic, who is at the same time a freemason or a member of a masonic lodge is to abstain from receiving Holy Communion and is prohibited from receiving other sacraments.
c) A freemason or a member of a masonic lodge who seeks baptism in the Catholic Church, or who seeks to enter full communion with the Catholic Church as a validly baptised Christian, is to terminate this membership prior to baptism or reception into full communion.
d) No parish, no institute of consecrated life or society of apostolic life, no Catholic organisation or institution in our local churches is to enter into agreements of collaboration with freemasons or masonic lodges or make use of properties belonging to masonic lodges.
The implementation of these provisions will require patience, pastoral care and kind attention. We invite you to study the official documents that account for the Church’s position in order to expound them carefully and correctly.
We have confidence in your gifts and experience, knowing that you will be able wisely to accompany, with clarity of mind and a pastoral heart, those among the faithful who find themselves needing to terminate their bonds with freemasonry and masonic lodges.
The call of our Lord Jesus Christ, “Come, follow me” (Matt 4.19), presupposes readiness to leave behind other attachments that stand in the way of wholehearted discipleship. This has always been, and will always remain, a criterion of Christian authenticity. Let us help each other by word and example to live up to it, trusting in God’s grace.
With the assurances of our prayers for your ministry and for the faithful entrusted to your priestly care, we remain,
Yours in Christ,
+Erik Varden OCSO, President of the Nordic Bishops’ Conference
Territorial Prelate of Trondheim
Apostolic Administrator of Tromsø
+Raimo Goyarrola, Vice President of the Nordic Bishop’s Conference
Bishop of Helsinki
+David Tencer OFMCap
Bishop of Reykjavik
+Anders Cardinal Arborelius OCD
Bishop of Stockholm
+Czeslaw Kozon
Bishop of Copenhagen
+Fredrik Hansen
Bishop of Oslo
Sr. Anna Mirijam Kaschner CPS, Secretary General
***
Can Catholics be Freemasons? No
In the years 1974-80 an official process of conversation took place that involved the Catholic Church in Germany and German freemasonry. The conversation was coordinated by the German Bishops’ Conference and the United Grand Lodges of Germany. The Catholic Church was concerned to establish whether freemasonry had, in the years following World War II, changed to such an extent that Catholics might be freemasons. The conversations took place in an atmosphere marked by openness, concerned to establish facts. The Catholic Church was granted insight into the freemasons’ first three degrees.
Examination of these degrees made it clear that there remain fundamental and insuperable contradictions between the Church and freemasonry. The essence of freemasonry turns out to remain unchangeably the same. To be a freemason is to cast doubt over the whole of Christian existence. The examination of the freemasons’ rituals, ideology and self-understanding was thorough. It clearly showed that it is impossible to be a member of the Catholic Church and at the same time to be a freemason.
Reasons
1. The freemasons’ outlook on life
The freemasons’ outlook on life is not clearly defined, but it tends towards humanism. The words and gestures found in the books of rituals combine to form a frame which each individual mason can fill with personal notions. It was impossible to trace a binding shared ideology. By contrast, relativism is a fundamental conviction of freemasonry. In the Internationales Freimaurer-Lexikon one reads that ‘freemasonry is the only system that over time has managed to keep both ideology and practice far away from dogmas. Freemasonry may therefore be understood as a movement for relativistically inclined human beings in pursuit of humanistic ideals.’ This sort of subjectivism is incompatible with faith in the Word of God who revealed Himself to the world and is rightly expounded by the Church’s magisterium. Further, it confounds Catholics’ view of the Church’s sacred, sacramental actions.
2. Freemasonry’s view of truth
Freemasons deny that there is such a thing as an objective recognition of the truth. During the conversations the well-known words of G.E. Lessing were often invoked:
If God held in his right hand all truth and in his left the constant, lively urge for truth — with the stipulation that I might always, and for eternity, make a wrong choice — and then said to me, ‘Make your choice!’, I would in all humility have cast myself into his left hand and said: ‘Father, give me this! Pure truth is for you alone.’
The freemasons said in our conversations that this was most relevant for them. The proposition that all truth is relative is the foundation of freemasonry. Freemasons refuse commitment to dogma both within and outside the lodge. It is required that the freemason should be one who is ‘free from subjection to dogma and passion’. This implies a rejection in principle of any dogmatic position, as is clearly stated in the Freimaurer Lexikon: ‘All institutions based on dogma (among which the Catholic Church is most prominent) constrain people to believe.’ Such a view of truth is incompatible with the Catholic understanding of truth with regard both to natural theology and the theology of revelation.
3. The freemasons’ understanding of religion
The freemasons’ understanding of religion is relativistic. All religions are seen as competing attempts to express a divine truth that in any way can never be attained. The only apt expression of divine truth are the symbols of the freemasons, which every freemason interprets as he or she can. That is why the lodge strictly forbids religious discussion among freemasons. The constitutions, dated 1723, of the United Grand Lodge of England state in the first paragraph:
A Mason is obliged by his Tenure, to obey the moral law; and if he rightly understands the Art, he will never be a stupid atheist, nor an irreligious libertine. But though in ancient Times Masons were charged in every Country to be of the Religion of that Country or Nation, whatever it was, yet it is now thought more expedient only to oblige them to that Religion in which all Men agree, leaving their particular Opinions to themselves.
The notion of a religion ‘in which all Men agree’ presupposes a relativistic understanding of religion that is incompatible with the fundamental conviction of Christianity.
4. The freemasons understanding of god
The notion of ‘the great Architect of the universe’ is central to the rituals of freemasonry. It must be deemed a deistic notion, even where one endeavours with good will to be open to other religions. There is not, further to this, any objective recognition of the divine that allows for the understanding of a personal God. The idea of ‘the great Architect of the universe’ is neutral, open to all sorts of interpretation. Anyone can fill it with his or her own understanding of the divine, be they Christians or Muslims, Confucianists, Animists, or adherents of whatever cult. According to the freemasons, the ‘great Architect’ is not a personal God. A vague, general religious sentiment is all it takes to recognise ‘the great Architect of the universe’. The idea of a universal architect enthroned on a deistic sideline undermines Catholic faith in a God who speaks to human beings as Father and Lord.
5. The freemasons’ view of god and of revelation
All Christians believe and profess that God has revealed himself. The freemasons’ view of god excludes such belief. Talk of a ‘great Architect of the universe’ takes the relationship of humans to the divine back to a pre-deistic stage. Freemasons consider the astral primal religion of Babylonians and Sumerians a source of Christian belief. This is in flagrant opposition to a faith based on Revelation.
6. The freemasons’ understanding of tolerance
The freemasons’ view of truth also conditions their view of tolerance. A Catholic will uphold that tolerance is a matter of charitably putting up with other people. Freemasons, in contrast, are to tolerate ideas, no matter how contradictory they may be. It may be useful to cite, once again, from Lennhoff and Posner:
Relativism leads directly to the freemasons’ outlook on the world and on the problems of humankind. […] Relativism proposes reasonable arguments for tolerance. Freemasonry is a movement that, since the end of the Middle Ages, reacted against both the absolute teaching of the Church and political absolutism, and against all kinds of fanaticism.
This view of tolerance confounds fidelity to and recognition of the Church’s magisterium among Catholics.
7. The rituals of freemasonry
In the detailed conversations the rituals of the degrees of apprentices, fellows, and masters were discussed. The actions indicated in these rituals by words and symbols resemble sacraments. They give the impression that these symbolic actions objectively transform a person. The stand for a symbolic initiation set to compete with the transformation of human beings by the Church’s sacraments.
8. The perfectibility of man
The rituals show that freemasonry envisages the ethical and spiritual optimisation of the human being. In the ritual for the master’s degree one can read: ‘What virtues must a true master possess? Purity of heart, truth in speech, prudence in action, fearlessness faced with unavoidable evils and persevering zeal in good deeds.’ This kind of ethical optimisation, by being proposed as an absolute, is disconnected from God’s grace. It leaves no space for the idea of man’s justification as a Christian understands it. What is the point of Baptism, Penance, and the Eucharists, had man already been illumined and brought to conquer death through the first three degrees?
9. The spirituality of freemasonry
Freemasonry makes a total claim on the whole human being, requiring adherence in life and death. Even if one grants that the first three degrees are principally intended to form consciousness and character, it remains an open question whether the Church’s mission admits this sort of formation exercised by another institution. This total claim shows clearly that freemasonry is incompatible with the Catholic Church.
10. Different directions within freemasonry
There are within freemasonry a majority of lodges representing a humanitarian, ‘believing’ tendency. Alongside them are extreme orientations like, on the one hand, the atheistic fraternity of the ‘Grand Orient de France’ that also has lodges in Germany and, on the other hand, the ‘Große Landesloge’. The latter further calls itself ‘the Christian order of freemasonry’. So-called ‘Christian freemasonry’ is in no way outside the basic constitution of freemasonry; it is motivated simply by the wish to reconcile freemasonry with subjective Christian faith. Such a position is theologically untenable. The facts of Revelation (God’s incarnation and his communion with humankind) are recognised as one possible variant within the general outlook of freemasonry — and it is one that only a minority of freemasons will recognise.
11. Freemasonry and the Catholic Church
Different forms of freemasonry relate to the Church in different ways: some are friendly, some are neutral, some are hostile. These differences matter; but they mislead if they make people think that the membership of Catholics is impermissible only when it comes to lodges hostile to Christianity. The investigation that has been carried out has been based, precisely, on freemasonry well-disposed to the Church. Even here the incompatibility of Catholic faith and freemasonry is of a fundamental nature.
12. Freemasonry and the evangelical church
In 1973 there were conversations between freemasonry and the [German] evangelical church. The results of these conversations were presented in a final report on 13 October 1973. The representatives of the evangelical church left it to the conscience of individual Christians to evaluate the possibility of membership in freemasonry. A really remarkable point is made in the report’s fifth paragraph:
It was impossible for the church’s representatives to reach a final conclusion regarding the meaning and significance of rituals. But the question kept arising whether the rites and activities of freemasonry would not reduce the significance for the evangelical Christian of justification by grace.
Conclusion
The basic attitudes and activities of freemasons have remained exactly the same, even if persecution under Nazism led to greater openness to other societal groups. The contradictions displayed touch the very foundation of Christian life. Detailed investigation of the freemasons’ rituals and spirituality made it patently clear that simultaneous membership of the Catholic Church and of freemasonry is impossible.
[Summary of essential points from the Erklärung der Deutschen Bischofskonferenz zur Frage der Mitgliedschaft von Katholiken in der Freimaurerei from 1980]
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Here is the above summary in PDF, with notes to relevant sources. It is followed by the German original. Another helpful reference is the volume produced by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 2015, with a preface by Cardinal Luis F. Ladaria SJ and an introduction by Cardinal Gerhard L. Müller: Dichiarazione circa le associazioni massoniche (Rome, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2015). You can also find pertinent statements by the Holy See here and here.