Bishop Erik Varden has called for a balanced approach to immigration, one that rejects viewing every stranger as an enemy, often on the grounds of “ethnic purity,” while reminding immigrants that they have “solemn duties toward their country of adoption.”
In a Sept. 22 address to the autumn plenary assembly of the Nordic Bishops’ Conference, the bishop of Trondheim observed that populism today derives from prevailing domestic and global uncertainties and challenges — from wars, “extreme weather” and an energy crisis, to refugees, concerns over AI, and a “social fabric that is rending.”
Bishop Varden, who led Pope Leo XIV’s Lenten spiritual exercises for the Roman Curia earlier this year, noted that the word “populist” first emerged in the late 19th century and derived from a sense among the “common people” — the majority of a country’s population who make it run — that their voices “were ignored by a distant elite” and thus felt “disenfranchised and left in the dark.”
In such a world of “uncertainty” and alienation, it is “not bad” for citizens to “look to their nation, their people, for stability,” he said, adding that “cries of protest” are “natural, even healthy.” What unites a nation,
