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

Sigrid Undset and the English Catholic Martyrs

I've almost finished a biographical study of Sigrid Undset by Father Aidan Nichols, OP, published by Ignatius Press: Sigrid Undset: Reader of Hearts. In the course of his discussion of her conversion to Catholicism, Father Nichols reminded me that she had written about a couple of English Catholic martyrs of the Recusant era, Saint Robert Southwell, poet and Jesuit missionary, and Saint Margaret Clitherow, wife, mother of two Catholic priests, and protector of priests. (Neither had been canonized at the time, however.) He also notes that English Catholic authors had some influence on Undset's conversion.

Father Nichols examines these interests and influences in two chapters, one describing those contemporary English Catholic writers like Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson, Hilaire Belloc, and G.K. Chesterton (chapter 6, "The Thirties, or the Coming of War"). The other (chapter 9, "The Hagiographer") offers some details about how she depicted the lives, not just of Southwell and Clitherow, but also of Saints Edmund Campion and Philip Howard.

We'll be taking up this subject in a series on the Son Rise Morning Show in September, starting 9/14 (after the Labor Day hiatus), looking first at the contemporary English Catholic writers who accompanied Undset as she prepared to become a Catholic and then at those martyrs as she told their stories. English Catholicism, from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, was essential to Undset's conversion.

Since Bishop Fredrik Hansen of Oslo declared on July 8 that he would be opening a Cause for Undset's sainthood, she's been getting more attention.

Stay tuned for future updates on this story, as they used to say on the radio!

From the New Liturgical Movement: The Eucharist in Medieval England

On June 1 and 8 the New Liturgical Movement website posted two articles by Robert Keim explaining English Catholic devotion to the Blessed Sacrament--under other terms--before the Reformation. An excerpt from the first article, “The Old Leaven” of Catholic Truth, Part 1: Eucharistic Language and Eucharistic Faith in Medieval England:

The term “eucharist,” a borrowing from Greek via Latin and French, does not appear in Vices and Virtues ["a homiletic prose dialogue written in the Middle English of the early thirteenth century"] , and in fact, it does not appear as an English-language word in any document from the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons until sometime in the fourteenth century. English Catholics of the early and high Middle Ages had various other titles for the Blessed Sacrament, and these titles give us an opportunity to consider how their eucharistic language formed their eucharistic faith—and a formidable faith it was, despite the unedifying individuals mentioned in Vices and Virtues, who were surely the exception. On the eve of the Reformation, the sacramental body of Christ was still “the focus of all the hopes and aspirations” of the English people . . .

And from the second article, this explanation of King Hamlet's Ghost speaking about the untimeliness of his murder:

The most standard item of eucharistic vocabulary in Old and Middle English is also one of the most unfamiliar in modern English: housel (pronounced “HOW-zuhl” and also spelled husel, housul, howsell, etc.). This word was used as a noun meaning primarily “the Eucharist” and as a verb meaning “to administer the Eucharist to.”

Actually, countless speakers and students of modern English have seen this word, but they may not have noticed it or understood its meaning. It appears in Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5, when the ghost of Prince Hamlet’s father describes his murder at the hands of “that adulterate beast” Claudius. The ghost laments that he was

Of life, of crown, of queen at once dispatch’d;
Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin,
Unhousel’d, disappointed, unanel’d;
No reckoning made, but sent to my account
With all my imperfections on my head.
O, horrible! O, horrible! most horrible! . . .

So King Hamlet was murdered, as Keim explains, before he could confess his sins, received the Last Rites (Extreme Unction), and Viaticum (Holy Communion).

Keim concludes the second article with a quotation from Thomas E. Bridgett's History of the Eucharist in Great Britain (1881, two volumes):

For more than a thousand years the races that successively peopled [Great Britain] regarded the celebration of this Sacrament as the central rite of their religion, the principal means of divine worship, the principal channel of divine grace. The Holy Eucharist was the great mystery of faith, the object not only of fear and of love, but also of supreme adoration.

Father Thomas E. Bridgett was a convert to Catholicism as a teenager (16 years old) and served as Redemptorist missionary to England and Ireland after 1856. According to the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica:

Despite his arduous life as a priest, Bridgett found time to produce literary works of value, chiefly dealing with the history of the Reformation in England; among these are The Life of Blessed John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester (1888); The Life and Writings of Sir Thomas More (1890); History of the Eucharist in Great Britain (2 vols., 1881); Our Lady’s Dowry (1875, 3rd ed. 1890). He died at Clapham on the 17th of February 1899.

Please read the rest of these articles at the links above!

Image Source (No Restrictions/Public Domain): The Miraculous Mass of St. Gregory (some notes from Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas on this Mass and its impact on a non-believer in the Real Presence)

Lingard on Newman, Part Two

I've been waiting for this article since January of this year, when I wrote:

I look forward to learning more about Lingard's reasons for not liking Newman in the promised subsequent article. . . .

I also commented that John Lingard's desire for conversions to the Catholic Church was not completely satisfied by those who converted: he mistrusted Newman and Faber, etc.

Shaun Blanchard's concluding article about Lingard's mistrust and dislike of Newman continues the same theme: rather contradictory but also rather ignorant. For example Blanchard notes that Lingard associated Newman with Faber too closely--he lumped the Oxford converts together without distinction or discrimination:

Lingard followed news of Newman and his conversion closely.[12] However, in addition to never really permitting Newman to shake his association with the Oxford Movement (a strike against him in Lingard’s eyes), the old Cisalpine also seems to have negatively associated Newman with Faber (whom he called “credulous”)[13] and with the burgeoning ultramontanism and Romanticism sweeping English Catholicism. Unfortunately, Lingard never recognized Newman as the profoundly unique thinker he was, nor as one who deftly eschewed the standard binaries and party lines of the age and of the church. Lingard even admitted, in 1845, to not having yet read Newman![14] . . .

The second reason for Lingard’s sense of alienation from those he called the “Newmanites” was more principled. When he bluntly admitted to John Walker in January of 1850 that he “didn’t like Newman” that reasons he cited are telling: “too much fancy or enthusiasm.”[20] While there is an element of taste here—Lingard was a man of the Catholic Enlightenment who naturally recoiled from Romanticism and Pugin’s neo-Gothic revival—there was also an important principle at stake.[21] For Lingard, and many of his generation, the theologically correct and pragmatically most effective way to engage Protestants was through stripping away superstitions, triumphalism, and any unnecessary accretions to the Old Faith. Protestants rightly resented all of these things. What remained could be grasped by Protestants of good will as the pure faith of their English ancestors and, indeed, of the early church.

We have to remember that Lingard died in 1851, just after the Restoration of the Hierarchy and just six (6) years after Newman's conversion--but for one who knows a little about Newman's devotional and even architectural proclivities, these comments are strange and seem unfair. If Lingard hadn't read of any Newman's writings in 1845, would he have read Loss and Gain, the Discourses to Mixed Congregations, or Anglican Difficulties (or followed the reports of the lectures) by 1850? 

He seems to have relied merely upon his impressions and prejudices, not upon any real research or sources.

Lingard had very particular goals in mind for any converts, and Blanchard again highlights Lingard's rather contradictory views of the converts coming out of the Oxford Movement:

There is a kind of paradox here, or at least a tension, because on one hand Lingard intimated that the new converts were not Catholic enough—or at least suspiciously attached to “false ideas they imbibed at Oxford”—but on the other hand they were resented for being too Catholic, in the sense of trying to assimilate their Catholicism too much to a foreign standard that was Roman, “Jesuitical,” or Italian.

In an odd way, Newman appears to great advantage in this article, because not knowing what Lingard had written about him, he expressed admiration of Lingard's methods and "comportment":

Newman, thankfully, seems to have been totally unaware that Lingard disliked him. At the death of Lingard’s close friend John Walker in 1873 (to whom Lingard confided so much of his disdain for “Newmanites”!). Newman wrote of his “greatest esteem” for Walker. Newman “looked at [Walker] with veneration as one of the few remaining priests who kept up the tradition of Dr. Lingard’s generation of Catholics.”[24] Seven years earlier, Newman had written to John Walker, thanking him for sending information on Lingard’s intra-Catholic controversies in the early 1830’s. In light of his later praise of Lingard, Newman presumably approved of his comportment. In Lingardian fashion, Newman went on in the same letter to caution against the merits of seeking out confrontation with Anglicans.[25] . . .

Blanchard hopes that Lingard might have learned to like Newman if he had lived longer:

Had he lived longer, or had he been fairer to Newman and actually engaged with his thought as an individual rather than a symbol, Lingard would have seen that the sensitive and brilliant Oxford convert was in fact preserving many of the concerns that Lingard himself held dear. We should keep in mind that in the years around Newman’s conversion, Lingard was an old man, suffering on and off from ill health. It is nevertheless unfortunate that Lingard did not engage with Newman’s ecclesiology in particular. He would have discovered a kindred spirit with nuanced and sophisticated views of the structures and offices of the church. Lingard would have also seen how much more he had in common with Newman than with the Mannings, Fabers, and Wards with which he lumped him together. . . .

In his first footnote to the article, Blanchard highlights an excellent source for a review of Father John Lingard's historical career and outlook for his future investigation, which I reviewed in 2010:

An informative chapter on Lingard from John Vidmar should be included in my review of the secondary literature on Lingard: Vidmar, English Catholic Historians and the English Reformation, 1585–1954 (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2005), 52–74.

By the way, it's available in paperback now!

Devotion to St. Anne in Pre-Reformation England

In the Catholic Church, today is the Feast of St. Anne and St. Joachim, the maternal grandparents of Jesus Christ (Mary's parents) as named in the Protoevangelicum of St. James. On the 1970 Roman Calendar, they are honored together; on the 1962 Roman Calendar, they are honored separately--St. Anne today and St. Joachim on August 16. In the Church of England, Sts. Anne and Joachim are also commemorated today. In some Eastern Orthodox Churches, St. Anne is honored on September 9th in connection to the birth of the Theotokos (devotion to St. Anne began earlier in the East than in the West).

England developed devotion to St. Anne in the early Middle Ages as this study demonstrates:

By 1300 at least five important English monastic foundations were also claiming to have relics of Anne, and dozens of additional shrines, altars, and chapels had been dedicated to her, both in England and on the Continent.

Liturgical commemorations of Anne in the West seem to have followed a similar course of development, except that monastic houses in England played a more central role. The story of Joachim and Anne received at least passing mention in the liturgy for one of the oldest annual feasts of Mary, the Nativity of the Virgin (September 8 in Western calendars), which was included in the Sacramentary of Gelasius (c. 700) and firmly established in Anglo-Saxon England by the ninth or tenth century. Anne's role tended to take on more importance when an annual feast was added to celebrate the Conception of the Virgin (observed exactly nine months earlier - i.e., December 8). There is good evidence that the Conception was being commemorated at Winchester, Exeter, and Canterbury before the Norman Conquest, and this feast day was revived in the twelfth century through the efforts of Benedictine writers like Eadmer of Canterbury and Anselm of Bury, although it became generally established in England only after 1328 (when it was made obligatory for the whole Province of Canterbury) and was not clearly mandated for the Church as a whole until 1476 (when Pope Sixtus IV confirmed the Council of Basel's ruling on the matter). England also preceded most of the Continent in instituting a separate feast day for Anne herself (July 26). The date traditionally associated with the adoption of this feast is 1382, the year in which Pope Urban VI authorized its celebration throughout England, but it was already being celebrated in the twelfth century in some of the great English monastic churches, most notably those at Worcester and Evesham.

The great flowering of Anne's cult among the laity occurred between about 1300 and the Council of Trent in the mid sixteenth century. By 1540 there were at least 40 medieval churches and chapels under her patronage in England, the majority of which had been dedicated or rededicated to her during the previous two centuries. She also had major shrines at Buxton (Derbyshire) and Wood-Plumpton (Lancashire), and was frequently chosen by prosperous laymen and women as patron saint of their guilds and recipient of special bequests and offerings. As Gail Gibson has shown, such devotion to her seems to have been unusually strong in East Anglia. . . .

Please read the rest there. You may find information about the shrine at Buxton in Derbyshire here.

According to Peter Stiles in the Encylopedia of the Bible and Its Reception vol. 2 published by Walter de Gruyter in Berlin/New York 2009, which I accessed on Academia.edu:

John Lydgate (ca. 1370–1451) wrote two poems in honour of St. Anne. A Praise of St. Anne and An Invocation to Seynte Anne are significant contributions to the range of English poems on Anne between the 13th and the early 16th centuries, as are poems by Lydgate’s contemporaries, John Audelay and Osbern Bokenham. Bokenham’s Life of St. Anne is an extensive treatment of her life, one of thirteen the Augustinian friar wrote about female saints. Anne appears in several medieval plays, including the N-Town cycle and the Digby manuscript play of Candelmas Day and the killing of the children of Israel, which is set within the communal celebration of Saint Anne’s Day.

Saint Anne, pray for us!

Saint Joachim, pray for us!

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us!

And of course, I can't forget Saint Anne Line! Pray for us!

Image credit (public domain): Icon of St. Anne and the Theotokos (15th Century)

Lingard on Newman in "The Newman Review"

Shaun Blanchard, Assistant Professor of Theology at Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, tantalizes us in the opening paragraphs of an article in The Newman Review--and then promises more in a subsequent article--by quoting the Catholic historian Father John Lingard's opinion of the recent convert and Oratorian, Father John Henry Newman:

“I don’t like Newman,” wrote the famous English historian Fr. John Lingard in January 1850. The reasons the aged and ailing Catholic historian gave for his antipathy towards perhaps the most celebrated English convert of all time encapsulated the collision of old and new: “too much fancy or enthusiasm”[1] was Lingard’s gripe in a letter to his friend John Walker. The relative obscurity of Lingard today is surprising, since in his day (he died in 1851) he was “the best-known and most widely read English Catholic writer.”[2] Lingard’s “Victorian celebrity” was due primarily to ground-breaking historical works, but also significantly buttressed by his reputation as a formidable theo-political controversialist: both in intra-Catholic squabbles and in defense of his community against Protestant detractors.[3] The crowning achievement of a life of research, his eight-volume History of England (1819–1830) featured pioneering work with primary source material.[4] Lingard’s History was widely reviewed and debated. It was translated into many languages, went through multiple editions, and was even abridged for use as a school textbook in France. In the twentieth century, Hilaire Belloc added a final volume to bring the narrative from 1688 to the present; this version of Lingard’s History of England can still be found in old family libraries around the UK. Lingard can be counted as a kind of founding father of certain “revisionist” historical positions on English history advanced by scholars like Eamon Duffy and Christopher Haigh. Long before Duffy’s classic The Stripping of the Altars (1992), Lingard’s work suggested a re-narration of the Whiggish and triumphalist national story vis-à-vis Catholicism.[5]

Lingard in fact had quite a lot of interesting things to say about Newman, dating from his growing awareness of the importance of the Oxford Movement in the 1830s until Newman’s conversion in 1845, when Lingard was in his mid-seventies. In a subsequent essay, I’ll explore Lingard’s take on Newman and on the great changes sweeping the English Catholic community at the end of his life (Lingard strongly associated Newman with many of these changes, and mostly bemoaned them). This essay, however, will introduce readers to Lingard, one of the major intellectual lights of the English Catholic community when Newman joined it in 1845 at Littlemore. . . .

Please read the rest there. I look forward to learning more about Lingard's reasons for not liking Newman in the promised subsequent article. Lingard seems to have been most particular about how Catholics practiced their faith, and the last sentence in this quotation seems most contradictory:

While his willingness to defend the Catholic community from outside critics had won him renown, he grew extremely critical of elements within English Catholicism that he found embarrassing, theologically suspect, or intellectually wanting. He dismissively mocked Italian priests who came to England to run retreats fueled by “enthusiasm,” and criticized the women who attended them (sometimes directly, by letter, as attendees included close friends). Lingard’s correspondence also reflects a stereotypical English mistrust of the French and the Irish. A man of the eighteenth century and the Catholic Enlightenment, he could barely contain his dislike of Gothic revival, Pugin’s work, and the Anglo-Catholic Tractarians. While ardently desiring the conversion of non-Catholics, especially socially prominent Anglicans, he distrusted the leading converts of the Oxford Movement like Frederick Faber and Newman. . . .