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