Bernard keeps us on our guard. He states, “I want to warn you: no one lives on earth without temptation; if someone is freed from one, let them surely expect another.” We must cultivate the right balance between confidence in God’s help and distrust in our own frailty, fearing temptations while accepting their inevitability, remembering that God subjects us to them because they are useful.

Useful in what sense?

By resisting the arrows shot by the Father of Lies, our commitment to the truth is strengthened. We will be prepared, having turned away from debilitating falsehood, to strengthen our brothers and sisters.

Ambition represents a particular form of capitulation to falsehood. Ambition is a rather unsubtle, sublimated form of greed. In describing it, Bernard, ever eloquent, surpasses himself. Ambition, he says, is “a subtle evil, a secret virus, a hidden plague, an artisan of deceit; it is the mother of hypocrisy, the progenitor of envy, the origin of vices; it fuels crimes, causes virtues to rust, holiness to rot, and hearts to become blind. It turns remedies into diseases. From medicine, it extracts apathy.”

Ambition springs from an “alienation of the mind.” It is a madness that arises when the truth is forgotten. The fact that ambition is a form of madness makes it ridiculous in any instance, but especially when it occurs in people dedicated to selfless service. It is no coincidence that the figure of the ambitious clergyman haunts literature and film as a comic, yet unfunny, trope: from Jane Austen’s fawning parish priests to the sour-faced courtier in   Patrice Leconte’s remarkable film Ridicule .

“What is truth?”

People in our time sincerely ask this question, often with remarkable goodwill, despite their confusion, fear, and the constant rush in which they live. We cannot leave it unanswered. We have no energy to waste on the banal temptations of fear, vainglory, and ambition. We need our best efforts to uphold the substantial, essential, and liberating truth against more or less plausible and more or less diabolical substitutes that glitter deceptively.

In our situation, rich in opportunities, it is imperative to see and articulate the world in the light of Christ. Christ, who is the truth, not only protects us; he renews us, eager to reveal himself through us to a creation increasingly aware of its subjection to futility.

It is tempting to think that we should follow the world’s trends. It is, I would say, a dubious approach. The Church, a slow-moving body, will always run the risk of appearing and sounding outdated. But if it speaks its own language well—that of Scripture and liturgy, of its fathers and mothers, poets and saints past and present—it will be original and fresh, ready to express ancient truths in new ways, and able, as it has done before, to guide culture.

This work has an important intellectual dimension. It also has an existential dimension. As Cardinal Schuster said on his deathbed: “It seems that people are no longer convinced by our preaching, but in the presence of holiness, they still believe, they still kneel and pray.”

Was not the universal call to holiness—the call, that is, to embody the truth—the strongest note struck by the Second Vatican Council? It resonated splendidly like a gong throughout its deliberations. The Christian claim to truth becomes convincing when its splendor is made personally evident through sacrificial love in holiness, purified from the temptations of temporalism.

Erik Varden, Bishop of Trondheim, Norway, was invited to preach the 2026 Spiritual Exercises for Pope Leo XIV, the cardinals residing in Rome, and the heads of Dicasteries of the Roman Curia, which will be held from Sunday, February 22, to Friday, February 27.

1. First meditation
2. Second meditation
3. Third meditation
4. Fourth meditation
5. Fifth meditation