Preview: Undset and Benson's "Christ in the Church" on the Son Rise Morning Show

Sigrid Undset read and translated another book by Monsignor Robert H. Benson, Christ in the Church (as Kristus i kirken in 1926) so we will discuss the influence it had on her on the Son Rise Morning Show on Monday, September 28.

Unlike The Friendship of Christ, which could be characterized as work of Catholic spirituality written for Catholics, Christ in the Church is a work of Catholic apologetics written for both Catholics and non-Catholics. Like The Friendship of Christ it is based on sermons Benson gave in both Rome and Kensington, England (plus Boston, Massachusetts). Benson particularly defends the Catholic Church's authority and infallibility and its role in salvation. There is a printed edition available and there is also an online version.

For example of this apologetic tone, Monsignor Benson starts with:

The charge brought most commonly in these days against Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular, is that it claims in an unique and exclusive degree to contain the whole of truth. Surely, it is said, considering the religious history of the world - the numerous bodies that have flourished in East and West alike, in all the centuries of man's existence - such a claim is arrogant and impossible. We must find the truth, it is said, in the Least Common Multiple of the religious experiences of all men if we are intellectually democratic; or, if we have aristocratic leanings, in the unanimous conclusions (if any such can be found) of the best independent religious thinkers. Above all, we must be pliant and undogmatic; we must be willing to see the conclusions of this generation overthrown by the next; we must believe in progress even though we are not sure in what direction progress lies. For there is no absolute truth, no final revelation: creeds are no more than forms and symbols of the One Truth as held by various groups of minds and temperaments. [Saint John Henry Newman had called this the spirit of liberalism in religion!*]

No wonder Father Aidan Nichols includes the comment that Benson was among "the more hard-line English Catholic apologists". Remember that Benson was writing well before Pope Pius XII issued Mystici Corporis Christi in 1943, but as Nichols comments, Benson is writing about the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ--that's his model of the Catholic Church, and he concentrates on that image of the Body of Christ and each Catholic being a member of that Body:

But to the Catholic who sees in the Church a human society (often terribly human), but also a Body in which God dwells, an organism composed of countless individual cells, but indwelt by a Divine Personality - a Catholic who believes that this Society is actually redemptive of the human race, as well as the actually Divine Teacher - more than a school of thought, more than the best religious club in existence, more than the Ambassador of God, more than the Bride of Christ - to the Catholic who believes that the Church is not one among ten thousand, but One, unique, singular and final, between whom and other religious bodies there is no more comparison than between the creature and the Creator - to him, membership in that body, the position of a cell in that organism, is the one thing to which no other can be preferred; and the loss of that membership the one supreme catastrophe or crime. Certainly the Catholic holds that it is possible to belong to the Soul of the Church without external membership in the Body; it is possible, where there is no fault on the individual's side, that he may be united inwardly to the Person who inhabits that body; but such is not God's primary intention, and to forsake the Body is to forsake the soul. In any case the individual loses enormously by being forced to stand alone, without that grace and strength of unity which external membership in the external body can alone confer.

In "The Theological Controversialist", chapter 8 of Sigrid Undset: Reader of Hearts, Father Nichols emphasizes another aspect of this Mystical Body of Christ that seems contradictory: its holiness and the sinners within it. As Benson admits, just as it was when Christ was in the world:

we have the same environment - namely, the human nature of the world, human ambitions, interests, virtues, vices, circumstances, strengths and weaknesses, now as then. We should expect to find then, if the Catholic hypothesis is true, the same results now as then. So far as Jesus Christ was accepted or rejected then by the world into which He came, so will He be accepted and rejected now, and by the same kind of people for the same kind of reasons. . . .If, then, we find in the history of the Catholic Church the same psychological situations as those recorded in the Gospels continually reproduced under similar circumstances - if we find, that is, Peters and Judases and Pilates swarming round the Church's progress through the ages - if we find that the same comments are made, the same paradoxes generated, the same accusations leveled, the same criticisms, the same bursts of flame and thunder . . .

we shouldn't be surprised. It's not evidence against the holiness and infallibility of the Church Our Lord founded. Undset, the creator of unfaithful, sinful, and fallen "good" characters--and herself repentant--saw the truth in Benson's argument. The Church is holy because the Church is the Body of Christ and Christ is Holy.

When I attended daily Mass on Friday in the 25th Week of Ordinary Time, Father Hoffman at St. Paul's Catholic Student Center (the Newman Center) at WSU, made clear the contrast between the reading from Ecclesiastes (3:1-11*) about the variability of human life and the Gospel from St. Luke (9:18-22), with St. Peter's declaration is Jesus is "the Christ of God", Someone sure and certain. Then Father pointed out that's what the students coming to OCIA are seeking and seeing in the Catholic Church: that certainty and security in the midst of change and a seeming lack of "gain from the efforts they make" (Eccl 3:9). 

On page 134 in "The Theological Controversialist", Father Nichols cites Undset's Katholsk propaganda in which she wrote "that the Church's inner essence is indefectible, like God's." (Oslo: Some, 1927, p.4). As my best friend often reminds me, there's no comparison, really, between the number of Catholics living on Earth right now and the millions of Catholic souls, purified and purifying, in Heaven and Purgatory. They are the larger and holiest part of the Church: they are the fulfillment of that indefectibility.

* “Liberalism in religion is the doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion, but that one creed is as good as another, and this is the teaching which is gaining substance and force daily. It is inconsistent with any recognition of any religion, as true. It teaches that all are to be tolerated, for all are matters of opinion. Revealed religion is not a truth, but a sentiment and a taste; not an objective fact, not miraculous; and it is the right of each individual to make it say just what strikes his fancy. Devotion is not necessarily founded on faith. Men may go to Protestant Churches and to Catholic, may get good from both and belong to neither. They may fraternise together in spiritual thoughts and feelings, without having any views at all of doctrine in common, or seeing the need of them. Since, then, religion is so personal a peculiarity and so private a possession, we must of necessity ignore it in the intercourse of man with man. If a man puts on a new religion every morning, what is that to you? It is as impertinent to think about a man’s religion as about his sources of income or his management of his family. Religion is in no sense the bond of society.” Biglietto Speech May 12, 1879

**I'm sure that other people of a certain age were hearing the Byrds singing "Turn, Turn, Turn" in their mind's ear.

Image Source (Public Domain): Albrecht Dürer - Adoration of the Trinity

Preview: Undset and Robert Hugh Benson: "The Friendship of Christ"

To begin our discussion of the English Catholic influences on Sigrid Undset's conversion to Catholicism on the Son Rise Morning Show, we thought it a good idea to start with a work we'd discussed in the Advent and Christmas seasons of 2025/2026 and during the Lent of 2026. We looked at Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson's The Friendship of Christ (at least the sections on "Christ in the Exterior" and "Christ in His Historical Life") quite extensively during those discussions.

So on Monday, September 21, we'll explore how Benson's spiritual advice to Catholics influenced Sigrid Undset to become a Catholic and why she'd want to translate The Friendship of Christ into Norwegian as Kristi Venskap in 1928, four years after her reception into the Catholic Church.

To understand why Undset was even looking at Catholic writers like Benson I think we need to look at her life during the late 1910s and early 1920's. She'd met and married a man already married with children and then found out that they had couldn't live together, that he was not reliable (!). She'd been raised to be artistic, observant, and critical and the man she married, Anders Castus Svasrstad, an artist, was "even more observant and critical" and she appreciated that, according to Tordis Orjasaeter (cited in Nichols, pp. 34-35). They were married in 1912 and he left for Paris in 1914. By 1915, she was reading Belloc, Chesterton, Christopher Dawson, and Monsignor Benson. Her relationship with her husband continued to deteriorate. 

What did she find in Benson's The Friendship of Christ? She clearly found something there that she could not find in Norway's Lutheran Church, her own creativity, or her criticism of contemporary feminism and other trends to help her deal with her married life.

In a chapter from The Friendship of Christ we have not looked at before extensively on the Son Rise Morning Show, Monsignor Benson describes friendship as a mystery--a fallible mystery, on the natural plane in contrast to Divine friendship:

Human friendships usually take their rise in some small external detail. We catch a phrase, we hear an inflection of a voice, we notice the look of the eyes, or a movement in walking; and the tiny experience seems to us like an initiation into a new world. We take the little event as a symbol of a universe that lies behind; we think we have detected a soul exactly suited to our own, a temperament which either from its resemblance to our own, or from a harmonious dissimilarity, is precisely fitted to be our companion. Then the process of friendship begins; we exhibit our own characteristics; we examine his: in point after point we find what we expected to find, and we verify our guesses; and he too, no less, follows the same method, until that point is reached (as it is reached in so many cases, though not, thank God! in all), either in a crisis, or after a trying period, when we discover either that we have been mistaken from the beginning, or that we have deceived the other, or that the process has run its course; the summer is come and gone, and that there are no more fruits to gather on either side.

Now the Divine Friendship -- the consciousness, that is to say, that Christ desires our love and intimacy, and offers His own in return -- usually begins in the same manner. It may be at the reception of some sacrament, such as we have received a thousand times before; or itmay be as we kneel before the Crib at Christmas, or follow our Lord along the Way of the Cross. We have done these things or performed those ceremonies dutifully and lovingly again and again; yet on this sudden day a new experience comes to us. We understand, for example, for the first time that the Holy Child is stretching His arms from the straw, not merely to embrace the world -- that would be little enough! -- but to embrace our own soul in particular. We understand as we watch Jesus, bloodstained and weary, rising from His third fall, that He is asking our own very self in particular to help Him with His burden. The glance of the Divine Eyes meets our own; there passes from Him to us an emotion or a message that we had never before associated with our own relations with Him. The tiny event has happened! He has knocked at our door, and we have opened; He has called and we have answered. Henceforth, we think, He is ours and we are His. Here, at last, we tell ourselves, is the Friend for whom we have been looking so long: here is the Soul that perfectly understands our own; the one Personality which we can safely allow to dominate our own. Jesus Christ has leapt forward two thousand years, and is standing by our side; He has come down from the painting on the wall; He has risen from the straw in the manger -- My Beloved is mine and I am His. . . . (Part I. Christ in the Interior Soul, Chapter II. The Friendship of Christ (Interior)

Perhaps Undset responded well to Benson's caution that some Catholics neglect their friendship with Christ, either relying on their own efforts to pray and adore, sacrifice, repent, and worship. He provides faithful Catholics, as we highlighted in our series earlier this liturgical year, insights into responding to Our Lord's desire to make sure that we're not alone (Genesis 1:8) and that He is our true friend--our one true friend.

Another chapter that might have appealed to Undset is the one about Christ in The Saint. As the creator (or sub-creator as Dorothy L. Sayers would put it) of characters like Kristen Lavransdatter and Erland, Jenny, Marta and Otto, etc., she'd see the creation and development of sanctity in a person as something great and artistic:

. . . He is in them as a flame is in a lantern; that their lives are not mere imitations or reflections of His, but actually manifestations of it. The graces that they display are actually the same graces as those with which this Sacred Humanity was saturated; their horror of sin is His; the powers which they exercise are His. They are "the light of the world,"{7} since there burns in them the Supreme Light of the world. Their "life is hid with Christ in God."{8} They have, by the help of grace, hewn at the stone of their human nature, by mortification, by effort, by prayer -- even by the final strokes of martyrdom itself -- until, little by little, or all at once by sudden heroism, there has emerged from the gross material, not the angel of Michael Angelo, not merely a copy of the Perfect Model; but, in a real sense, that actual Model Himself. It is He Who has lived in them, as really, though in another manner, as in the Sacrament of the Altar; it is He Who now appears in them in the culmination of their sanctity, visible to all who have eyes to see. Certainly it is not He Himself, pure and simple; since there still remains in every saint that film or glass of his own personal identity which God gave him and can never take away. For it is exactly for the sake of this personal identity, and for the service which it renders to the promulgation of Christ upon earth, that the saint has been created and sanctified.

Again I wonder how Undset would have reacted to the fact that Benson published this book after giving a series of sermons in Rome and Kensington because he was concerned that faithful practicing Catholics might not fully understand the friend they had in Jesus. While he made great and true statements about the fullness of the Catholic faith, Benson acknowledged that everyone in the Church might not have "that intimate knowledge of and companionship with Him in which the Divine Friendship consists". He wanted to make sure that they realized an assume fact: "He must be known (if His relation with us is to be that which He desires) in all those activities and manifestations in which He displays Himself." Therefore she needed to know Christ in the Eucharist, in the Church, in the Priest, in the Saint, in the Sinner, in the Average Man, and in the Sufferer. For someone who wanted to give her all to her art, her family, and her country and who wanted to create characters and worlds as vividly and wholly as possible--as I think Father Nichols describes her in his book--I think that would have appealed to her.

Image Credit (Public Domain): Benson in 1907

Back on the SRMS: Sigrid Undset and English Catholicism

On Monday, September 14, we'll begin a new series on the Son Rise Morning Show, looking at how much English Catholicism influenced Sigrid Undset in her conversion to Catholicism. We'll lay the groundwork in this first episode and then look at certain works in finer detail during subsequent episodes.

One reason for looking at this subject is that the bishop of Oslo, Fredrik Hansen intends to open a Cause for Undset's canonization later this year. As Bishop Hansen noted that she won't be canonized because she's a great author and Nobel Prize Winner for her great trilogy, Kristin Lavransdatter, nor because she lived a perfect moral life (she married a divorced man years before her conversion), but instead because she offers "the Catholic Church in Norway [ . . .] a concrete example of that calling lived out in public life, suffering, motherhood, and conversion" as she repented and pursued holiness in her life.

Another reason is that not only contemporary Catholic authors like Belloc, Chesterton, Monsignor Benson, etc., influenced her, but the stories of the English Catholic martyrs of the Elizabethan era offered her great examples of heroism and fidelity. Catholicism was a minority religion in Norway; she'd been raised in an irreligious family. Donald DeMarco described some of her background:

Her religious upbringing was virtually nonexistent. Both her parents were atheists. She abandoned Lutheranism, which was the state-supported religion, having found it to be anemic.

“I have never understood the meaning of the Reformation,” she said, “as other than a history of revolt of believing Christians who, subjectively pious, hoped that true Christianity agreed better with their subjective idea of Christianity than [with] the factual one.”

In her long, arduous journey to Catholicism, she could say that the Catholic Church is “the only explanation of existence.” . . .

“We sorely need the wisdom of the saint,” she declared. The Catholic saints of history are “the only thoroughly sane people … they stood in continual confrontation with the world.”

No wonder the English Catholic martyrs--not yet canonized at the time, but beatified with a cult developing more and more--as saints attracted her in their "confrontation with the [Elizabethan] world."

This website lists some of the English authors who had influenced her:

While Undset kept abreast of Catholic thought on the continent, it was the English who had the greater influence on her. Her library contains over sixty books by G. K. Chesterton and over thirty by Hilaire Belloc and Robert Hugh Benson each. Chesterton and Benson made such an impression on Undset that within a few years of her conversion, she set about several translations for the benefit of her compatriots. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man (1925) was translated in 1931 as the 450-page Den Evige Menneske and Benson’s Christ in the Church (1911) and The Friendship of Christ (1912) were rendered into Norwegian as Kristus i kirken (1926) and Kristi Venskap (1928) respectively.

In Sigrid Undset: Reader of Hearts, Father Aidan Nichols, OP, adds Belloc's The Catholic Church and History and Chesterton's The Catholic Church and Conversion to this list. He also refers to these writers as "the more hard-line English Catholic apologists"[!]. (p. 96) Father Nichols cites one Finn Thorn who "evidently regretted . . . her seeming lack of interest in John Henry Newman"[!!]. (p. 95)

So, we'll look these different English Catholic influences on Sigrid Undset's conversion over the next several weeks on the Son Rise Morning Show!

Image Source (Public Domain): Sigrid Undset Nobel laureate in Literature 1928