(LifeSiteNews) — The bishop of Oslo, Norway, announced Wednesday that he will open a canonization cause for Sigrid Undset, Nobel Prize-winning author of the widely lauded Kristin Lavransdatter series.
“She is far more than an author and Nobel Prize laureate. For us, she is a model of Christian faith, of a life lived in virtue, and of the pursuit of holiness,” Bishop Fredrik Hansen said during Mass on the island of Selja off the coast of Norway during a pilgrimage to celebrate the feast of St. Sunniva.
“Sigrid Undset lived a faithful Christian life in a world of turmoil. She stood firm in the Catholic faith. She challenged Nazism and strove for Norwegian freedom,” Bishop Hansen, who was appointed the Coadjutor Bishop of Oslo by Pope Francis in 2024, wrote in a June 8 email to The Pillar.
The bishop also stressed Undset’s care for her disabled daughter that he described as part of her “commitment to life and to the sanctity of life.”
“She was a friend of the poor and a defender of life. And, of course, her deeply Catholic writings, which have fortified many — throughout the Church — in the faith.”
Undset, who was born in 1882 and raised in Norway, is best known for her fictional Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy, published in the 1920s, about the turbulent life of a woman living in the Middle Ages.
Raised by atheists, Undset lived much of her life as an agnostic and is said to have gradually changed her attitude toward the Christian faith during her marriage and after the outbreak of World War I. It was after she divorced her husband and wrote her most famous works that she eventually converted to Catholicism in 1924 at age 42. She thereafter became a lay Dominican. At the time, there was a very small minority of Catholics in Norway, which was almost entirely Lutheran.
The writer brought the Catholic literary revival to Norway, writing essays about English Catholic martyrs, and a Saga of Saints that told the story of Norwegian history through the lives of its saints. She also reportedly met G.K. Chesterton and translated some of his work into Norwegian.
Undset was forced to flee Norway when Germany invaded the country in 1940. She had openly criticized Nazi ideology and Adolf Hitler since the early 1930s, and her books were banned in Nazi Germany. She first escaped to Sweden and later went into exile in the U.S., where she advocated for a free Norway as well as for European Jews.
She joined St. Ansgar’s Scandinavian Catholic League and wrote several articles for its bulletin.
Undset reportedly had a psychological breakdown while visiting her birth town about a year before her death in 1949.
It remains to be seen whether Undset will be found to have lived a holy life. If Pope Leo XIV grants a nihil obstat (“nothing stands in the way,”) a diocesan investigation of her life will proceed. If Undset is deemed to have lived a life of heroic virtue, she will be declared Venerable.