Church governance begins with holiness, not bureaucracy, Bishop Varden says at Curia retreat

Church governance depends more on holy, prayerful leaders than on bureaucratic expertise, Norwegian Bishop Erik Varden of Trondheim said during the Roman Curia’s Lenten retreat.

In his morning meditation Feb. 27, the final day of the retreat, Bishop Varden, a Trappist, reflected on St. Bernard of Clairvaux’s letter to his fellow monk and protege Bernard Paganelli, who later became Pope Eugene III.

The 12th-century text, he said, offered lessons on pastoral leadership that remain relevant today.

“In considering the problems of the Church, Bernard does not offer institutional remedies,” Bishop Varden told Pope Leo XIV and Vatican officials attending the retreat in the Pauline Chapel of the Apostolic Palace.

“Rather, he advises Eugene to surround himself with good men: the better the central offices of the Church are managed, the greater the benefit will be for the Church throughout the world,” he said.

Bishop Varden’s reflection, titled “On Consideration,” drew from St. Bernard’s treatise of the same name, written for Pope Eugene, the first Cistercian pope.

According to the pope’s biography on the Vatican City State website, Pope Eugene’s election came at a tumultuous time for the Church, and the pontiff relied on St. Bernard for spiritual and practical guidance.

St. Bernard’s “De Consideratione” provided the pope with instruction on the spiritual foundations of leadership, urging him to seek wisdom through prayer and to surround himself with men of integrity, the bishop noted.

Bishop Varden highlighted the saint’s distinction between contemplation and consideration. Contemplation, he said, concerned “truths already known,” while consideration “seeks the truth in contingent human affairs.”

With that in mind, St. Bernard urged Pope Eugene to choose collaborators with qualities marked by proven integrity and sound faith rather than proposing institutional solutions to challenges involving administration, diplomacy and conflict, the Norwegian bishop explained.

Such qualities, Bishop Varden said, “are valid in every age.”

Quoting the saint’s letter, he said such men “love and savor prayer and in it place their hope more than in their own shrewdness or in their work; their arrival is without clamor, their departure without pomp.”

With those qualities in place, practical decisions in Church governance can be measured against the Church’s “principal mission: that of giving glory to God,” Bishop Varden said.

“To consider earthly necessities rightly, we must seek, through them, what is above them. This is not, Bernard tells Eugene, in any sense ‘going into exile: to consider in this way is to return home,'” he said.

Invoking St. Augustine’s description of the episcopal office as a “sarcina” — the heavy backpack carried by Roman legionaries — Bishop Varden said that while the “pastoral burden has a frightening aspect, it is frightening only if we fail to notice who places the burden upon our shoulders.”

The burden, he said, “is nothing other than a participation in the sweet yoke of Christ himself, which makes us discover that the cross entrusted to us is radiant and light, and that being able to share it is a cause for joy.”

“Carry your burden to the end,” Augustine says in a sermon, Bishop Varden added. “If you love it, it will be light; if you hate it, it will be heavy.”

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