Aberdeen’s Bishop Visits Atchison’s Abbey

By Dr. James R. A. Merrick

This article was originally published in our August 2025 Kansas Monks newsletter. Read the whole newsletter at www.kansasmonks.org/newsletter/august2025

St. Benedict’s Abbey may be becoming the hottest summertime destination for European prelates. At the beginning of June, Hugh Gilbert, OSB visited from Aberdeen, Scotland for almost two weeks to preach the retreat for the monks. Next year, the monks will host Erik Varden, OCSO of Trondheim, Norway.

Gilbert and Varden are both former abbots and current bishops. Both are celebrated retreat masters and authors of weighty meditations on the Christian life. Both come to the Abbey, not with gimmicks or a variation on the latest fad in spirituality, but with humble provocations steeped in the timeless wisdom of the Scripture and Tradition of the Church, illustrated by decades of personal experience.

Bishop Gilbert is the eleventh bishop of Aberdeen (since the 1878 restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in Scotland). Originally from England, his early years were not especially devout. His time at the Anglican St. Paul’s School of London prompted him to ask for Baptism. On Christmas Eve at the age of eighteen, he entered the Catholic Church.

Immediately after attaining a first-class degree in history at the University of London, he joined the Benedictine monastery of Pluscarden in Elgin, Scotland. He remained at Pluscarden for thirty-seven years and served as abbot for a little over half those years.

Pluscarden Abbey is the oldest medieval monastery still in use in the United Kingdom, established originally as a Valliscaulian community in 1230 by the Scottish king Alexander II. After the dissolution of the monasteries in the sixteenth century, it was not re-established as a monastic institution until it was gifted in 1948 by the Third Marquis of Bute, Lord Colum Crichton-Stuart to the community of Prinknash in England, a once Anglican Benedictine community received into the Catholic Church in 1913. The return of Anglicans to the Catholic Church has thus been a theme of Bishop Gilbert’s personal as well as religious pilgrimage. It should come as no surprise that he is known to have a private devotion to the recently canonized former Anglican, St. John Henry Cardinal Newman.

Described as a “quiet scholarly monk,” Pope Benedict XVI asked Gilbert to serve as the Bishop of Aberdeen in 2011, the diocese in which Pluscarden Abbey is located. His episcopal predecessor described him as the “serene spiritual heart of the diocese.” Upon being nominated, Gilbert pledged to make Christ his top priority and chose “All things hold together in [Christ]” as his episcopal motto.

One of the features of Bishop Gilbert’s episcopal ministry has been the deliberate attempt to promote and increase religious life in his diocese (with a bit of help from the Americans). In 2013, he invited the acclaimed Nashville Dominican sisters to re-found Greyfriars Convent in Elgin Scotland, another gift from Lord Crichton-Stuart. In 2016, he welcomed the Sisters of the Holy Family of the Needy from Africa. Also under his oversight is a public association of the faithful – the Community of St. Andrew – started in Aberdeen by two American sisters in 2013.

Bishop Gilbert is widely hailed as a profound preacher and beloved retreat master. His monastic conferences and homilies have been variously published, including most recently All Time Belongs to Him: Seasons and Feasts of Our Lord (2024).

One of those published conferences caught the attention of the monks: The Tale of Quisquis: Reading the Rule of St. Benedict as Story (2014). Here, Gilbert reads the Rule not as a list of dos and don’ts but as St. Benedict’s attempt to map the dynamics of the Christian life as it takes shape in monastic community. The Rule is best read as a story of the soul on his way back to God by meeting the challenges of discipleship through daily prayer, obedience, and service to the community. It is “the story that grace writes over and over again in our lives.” It is not, he says, “a rigid progression of achievements but a natural unfolding of the Christian life…made of demanding and beautiful things…” (page xv).