Vatican City - It will be Msgr. Erik Varden, O.C.S.O., bishop and Trappist monk, who will preach the Lenten Spiritual Exercises for Pope Leo XIV and the Roman Curia. The choice, made with a view to the annual appointment that ushers in the penitential season of Lent, brings alongside the Pope a voice recognised for theological rigour, spiritual depth, and a solid monastic rootedness. There is, however, a further element to bring into focus: Varden belongs to that profile of bishops who, in recent years, have stood out for balance and for a constant appeal to the value of tradition, without indulging either in identity-based hardening or in headlong flights forward. He is a shepherd who reasons in terms of integration and not opposition, and precisely for this reason he is a man of communion.
Only cardinals - including those not serving in the Curia - and the heads of dicasteries will be able to take part in the meditations.
Who is Erik Varden?
Erik Varden, already known to our readers, because on several occasions we have reported his reflections and invited readers to pause over his words, is a Norwegian bishop. He is Prelate of Trondheim, Apostolic Administrator of Tromsø, and since 2024 he has also been President of the Scandinavian Bishops’ Conference.
A convert to Catholicism in his youth and educated at Cambridge, he comes from the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance. His experience brings together academic study, contemplative life, and pastoral governance in a minority and secularised ecclesial context such as that of Scandinavia. In recent years he has also established himself as an author and preacher, with texts and interventions that insist on the custody of interiority, on silence as a theological place, and on Christian memory as a response to contemporary fragmentation. Entrusting Varden with the preaching of the Exercises for the Pope and for the leadership of the Curia signals a precise spiritual and governing line: to bring ecclesial discernment back to a contemplative source, freeing it from the pressure of urgency and from activism. And, at the same time, to choose for the Curia a voice capable of safeguarding communion, resistant to the logics of faction and to polarisation.
In a context still marked by years of reforms, tensions, and institutional redefinitions, Leo XIV privileges a word capable of passing through the governance of the Church without reducing it to technique, recalling instead personal responsibility before God.
The Spiritual Exercises remain one of the rare moments in which time is taken away from frenzy to make room for listening. As we have anticipated, this year they will take place in the Pauline Chapel of the Apostolic Palace. In that context, the voice of Erik Varden will accompany the silence charged with expectation, inviting the Pope and his collaborators to measure themselves against what is essential.
fr.C.M.
Silere non possum