Vatican City, Apr 5, 2023 / 10:30 am (CNA).
In March, the bishops of the five Nordic countries issued a pastoral letter affirming the Catholic Church’s teaching on human sexuality.
“This covenantal sign, the rainbow, is claimed in our time as the symbol of a movement that is at once political and cultural,” the bishops wrote. “We declare dissent, however, when the movement puts forward a view of human nature that abstracts from the embodied integrity of personhood, as if physical gender were accidental.”
Bishop Erik Varden of Trondheim, Norway, spoke to CNA about the role of a bishop and why the Nordic bishops’ conference chose to publish a letter on sexuality and transgenderism at this time.
“Obviously the topic has been on our radar for a long time, as it has been on anyone’s radar,” Varden said via phone call last week. “The importance of saying something constructive has been obvious to us.”
The bishops discussed the issue at their fall 2022 meeting, and one member wrote a draft letter that was discussed at their March assembly.
“We were substantially in agreement about what we wanted to say and how we wanted to say it,” he said. “In terms of the substance I think we were entirely agreed.”
He said the pastoral letter was written for the people of their dioceses.
“But I suppose it’s part of this whole synodal dynamic,” he added. “The point is that everyone’s voice should be heard. We felt that we had something that we wanted and needed to contribute to an ongoing debate.”
Varden, 48, is a Trappist monk and spiritual writer. He was consecrated bishop of Trondheim, in central Norway, in 2020.
He noted that in discussions of gender and sexuality, “everything is subjectivized” and focused on people’s individual stories and wounds — giving the idea that everyone “has his or her own truth.”
“What we wanted to make clear was simply that we’re not sending this letter as eight individual blokes who agreed on something and then decided to make this known to the world,” he explained, “but that we have been commissioned to a teaching ministry, and that ministry isn’t about spouting our own opinions but about teaching and expounding as clearly as we can the truth that has been given to us.”
“The notion of the deposit of faith is very deep in the Christian understanding of transmission. It’s an extremely helpful reminder of what a bishop’s task is, which is to keep this deposit, which is vast and expansive, and introduce people to the richness contained in it.”
Talking about the truth
The bishops’ pastoral letter was read aloud at Masses the weekend of March 25 and 26 at Catholic churches in Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, and Iceland.
Varden said the bishops were surprised by the range of interest the letter provoked.
“The letter is longer than the average homily, so it was a bit of a Lenten mortification for the faithful” to have it read at Mass, he said. “But they accepted it very graciously.”
He said questions about sexuality are on everyone’s mind these days, especially given their prevalence in the media. Part of the reception of the letter was “a sense of relief that we could talk about it.”
“Part of our desire was to create an environment in which to talk about it without polemics,” he explained. The discussion, he added, has to be “grounded in faith, in Scripture, in Christology,” the study of the person of Jesus Christ.
“From a Christian point of view, anthropology divorced from Christology limps and is incomplete. And when the Church speaks about these issues, she needs to speak from what is her particular treasure of insight, which is a Christocentric insight.”
Though the Church’s teaching on sexuality is not always an easy thing to bring up, Varden said he hopes people will nonetheless talk about it around the dinner table.
“That’s another really important thing,” he said, “that we talk across generations about these things. Different generations speak different languages, but when it comes to issues of sexuality, when there’s a massive culture shift, there’s a risk we talk past each other.”
He said the bishops cannot force people to have these conversations, but they can invite them to.
“It’s hard to talk about, that’s why we need to practice,” he underlined.
“There’s a spiritual motif of the opportune time, and it is important to try to find the opportune time,” the bishop advised, also encouraging the use of tact.
He also said the discourse should be rooted in what it means to be a human and what it means to be the Church.
“Our times try to isolate this topic and discuss it in a bubble. This ends up being both complicating and limiting. As we point out in the letter, a purely secular take on sexuality is necessarily different from a Christian take on it because we’re dealing with very, very different understandings of what it means to be alive and what it means to be a human.”
“We have to be at the same time lucid and delicate. That’s the balance to aim for,” he said.
What’s next
Varden said when issuing the letter, the bishops hoped it would be a catalyst for further discussion in families, groups, and parishes.
“A lot will depend on local initiatives,” he said. “There’s a bit of a risk that pastoral letters from bishops aren’t what people will keep reading during the year.”
In the Diocese of Trondheim, Varden has encouraged his priests and catechists to incorporate the letter’s content into their preaching, teaching, and work with young people.
Varden will also be producing a series of weekly five- to 10-minute podcast episodes in English on sexuality and other topics. They will be available via online streaming after Easter.
He said he will be returning to the topic in some of his other talks and catechesis as well.
The bishop will also publish a book this summer on related topics and “spelling out the implications of what the bishops have said.”
“I met the other night a group of students and we sat around the table talking about chastity, of all things, and it’s just great to be able to do that in a way that isn’t merely prescriptive but is faith- and theology-based and grounded in real questions and real complexities,” he said.
Catholics have to talk about this topic “simply because it’s fundamental.”
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Hope springs eternal.
Cheers from around the world and from Chesterton’s synodally-abused “democracy of the dead”! We read: “The letter is longer than the average homily, so it was a bit of a Lenten mortification for the faithful […] But they accepted it very graciously.”
Maybe a long letter, but such things must be proclaimed at least once every half century or so, whether needed or not! But, have these Successors of the Apostles forgotten that, synodally, they’ve been groomed to function “primarily as facilitators” (the vademecum)? Now coloring outside the lines…how dare they! Will the letter be harmonized into a dismissive footnote at Cardinal Hollerich’s “expert” Synod on Synodality?
Or not? If only pigs had the wings of a dove!
Wow! Impressive and much-needed.
Thank you, Nordic bishops, for your breath of fresh air, so sorely needed in the heavily polluted ‘Catholic’ moral climate of our day and age. May the winds of the Holy Spirit continue to flow your and our way.
The short “Pastoral Letter on Human Sexuality” (approx. 3.5 letter-size pages) that comes from the Episcopal Conference of Scandinavia is perhaps the best one of a handful of such documents issued over the past few years by various ecclesiastical bodies, including the Diocese of Arlington’s “A Catechesis on the Human Person & Gender Ideology” (August 12, 2021), the Archdiocese of Milwaukee’s “Catechesis and Policy On Questions Concerning Gender Theory” (January 20, 2022), and Pope Francis’ Amoris Laetitia (March 19, 2016).
The primary reason why the Scandinavian pastoral letter is much better than the other documents mentioned above is because it does not make the same fundamental mistake that is repeated in those documents as set forth below.
The Arlington catechesis cites Amoris Laetitia, so it will suffice for both documents. In it we read the following:
“From medicine, natural law, and divine revelation, we know that each person is created either male or female, from the moment of conception. ‘It needs to be emphasized,’ writes Pope Francis, that ‘biological sex and the socio-cultural role of sex (gender) can be distinguished but not separated….’”
And in the Milwaukee catechesis, we read:
“Therefore, while biological sex and ‘gender’ – or the socio-cultural role of sex as well as ‘psychological identity’ – can be distinguished, they can never be separated.”
Also of concern primarily in the Milwaukee catechesis is an accepted definition of gender dysphoria as “the state in which a person claims to experience an incongruity between psychological identity and biological sex.” Once again note how gender is considered to be merely a psychological identity. Gender dysphoria, as it was rightly understood to be a disorder until the “transgender” movement began monkeying with it, is simply a biological female’s inability or refusal to recognize that she is in fact female, and a biological male’s inability or refusal to recognize that he is in fact a male.
Now, even though it is rightly declared that gender and biological sex can never be separated, by not recognizing them as essentially synonymous with each other as has been done since at least the 12th century, and by also proclaiming that gender is how one views and manifests oneself as either a male or female (or perhaps some kind of a hybrid), a de facto separation between biological sex and gender favored by “transgender” advocates is unnecessarily put into play. As a result of this approach that is increasingly accepted throughout the world, we continue to witness the ongoing and increasing destruction that this view of gender as psychological identity has wrought throughout all of society, including the societal-approved abuse of women by many men who irrationally declare themselves to be women based on their insistence that gender as they and their fellow travelers understand it (subjective feelings) is the more fundamental reality than biology is in determining who is a woman and who is a man or whatever they may declare themselves to be.
Both the Pope and the dioceses apparently never stopped to think about how the meaning of the word “gender” has been purposely manipulated to provide the “transgender” movement with ammunition to disqualify the accurate psychological diagnosis of “gender dysphoria” as a mental disorder that should be treated in the hopes of a cure. To be sure, job one of the “transgender” movement was to change the recognized meaning of gender as synonymous with biological sex, and too many people have indeed caved into this manipulation, including many members of the medical and psychological professions who engage in egregious malpractice by simply refusing to recognize the reality of their emperor patients without clothes and thereby help put an end to this objectively irrational behavior.
Thankfully, the Scandinavian Bishops have not fallen into the trap of making a bogus distinction between gender and biological sex. In a beautifully insightful statement from their “Pastoral Letter on Human Sexuality,” they write the following regarding the “transgender” movement:
“We declare dissent, however, when the movement puts forward a view of human nature that abstracts from the embodied integrity of personhood, as if physical gender were accidental. And we protest when such a view is imposed on children as if it were not a daring hypothesis but a proven truth, imposed on minors as a heavy burden of self-determination for which they are not ready. It is curious: our intensely body-conscious society in fact takes the body lightly, refusing to see it as a significant aspect of identity, supposing that the only selfhood of consequence is the one produced by subjective self-perception, as we construct ourselves in our own image.
When we profess that God made us in his image, the image does not just refer to the soul. It is mysteriously lodged in the body, too. For us Christians the body is intrinsic to personhood.”
Awesome! The Scandinavian Bishops wisely refuse to promote or kowtow to any nonsense about gender being a subjective psychological feeling or a mere cultural role. They recognize that there is no real distinction between biological sex and gender, and note in particular how they employ the perspicacious term ‘physical gender’ to help drive home the point that gender cannot be distinguished from biological sex.
If only the Pope and other bishops were as clear-headed on this topic as their Scandinavian brothers are. Such clear-headedness that presents objective truth without accepting any of the false claims of the “transgender” movement would greatly aid the fight against the malevolent movement that is a direct assault on God’s creative order. For now, at least we have some wise bishops who get it right. May the good Lord help spread the clarity of their thought far and wide.
We need much, much more of this type of teaching from our Bishops. I thank these Nordic Bishops.
Amen to that, Jim. If you haven’t done so already, be sure to read the Scandinavian Bishops’ most insightful pastoral letter, and also advise others to do the same.
Where does one find the letter?
Follow the first link to the CNA story, scroll down to the bottom and you’ll find a linked pdf of the letter
Amen to that, Jim. If you have not done so already, be sure to read the most insightful pastoral letter and recommend it to others as well.
Amen to that, Jim. If you haven’t done so already, be sure to read the Scandinavian Bishops’ most insightful pastoral letter, and also advise others to do the same.
“We declare dissent…”
Three simple, courageous, and necessary words for our times. Thank you for standing clearly and unapologetically for the truth. Stay strong.
Thank you Bishop Varden for your clarity and basic common sense! I am half Nordic and SO proud.
Patricia (Bryne on my Mother’s side) Helene Erzinger
The Left and Trans Crowd.Is more mixed up then a feather in a whirlwind.
@Thank you to the Nordic bishops!