Forgive me if I set off from a few personal remarks.

'Three years have passed since I was consecrated bishop. When I arrived here, I had spent thirty years abroad.

Norway had became to me a foreign country. I knew the Norwegian Catholic Church by hearsay.

I had no personal experience of parish life. Not only had I never been a parish priest; I'd never even been part of an ordinary parish.

I had been formed in university chaplaincies and in religious life. I was minded to proceed cautiously.

I first wanted to get to know people and places in the prelature, above all you, dear priests, my closest collaborators.

I had heard of abbots going on visitation with the visitation card already written before departure, sure of their analysis based on first principles. I did not want to follow such a method.

Trondheim had been without its own bishop for eleven years. That a brand new one should charge ahead on the basis of instinct seemed to me unproductive.

In addition we were right in the middle of Covid lockdowns. It wasn't a time to propose radical initiatives.

The three years that have passed have been good ones for me. After a few months I noticed I no longer broke out in a spontaneous cold sweat when I entered the bishop's office. It was a sign I was slowly settling in.

I have been surrounded by great good will. I am often moved by people's generous fidelity, by the will to build the Church up together, to do ‘something beautiful for God' as Mother Teresa said.

Our communities may be vulnerable, small, but they are marked by evangelical authenticity, by service and prayer and, when needed, by sacrifice.

That is in no small measure thanks to you, dear priests. You do precious, fruitful work. People really appreciate you. I really appreciate you! Thank you for the service you perform, for the testimony you give.

When I got here, major projects were looming. The nuns on Tautra were extending. The monks at Munkeby were preparing to build their monastery.

The basement beneath the cathedral lay formless and void, like the chaos on the first day of creation. Much in the curia needed to be refounded.

We have come a long way, thank God.

Further, the church in Molde is equipped with a new roof. Even the Yellow House in Ålesund is ready.

For a prelature like ours, with few resources, there is a limit to how much can be done at once. But we now have a certain freedom of movement for creative work. That is what I wish to speak of.

Let me begin by say something self-evident: the Catholic Church in Norway has changed a great deal in the past thirty years. This fact invites us to new self-understanding. It calls us to new forms of enterprise.

From the mid-19th century until recently, the Catholic Church in Norway saw itself chiefly as a chaplaincy for migrants and a few converts.

It rather appeared, if I may be irreverent, as a fridge designed for the preservation of exotic fruit. This model has done well, but is no longer sufficient.

There are, as I see it, two reasons for this.

First, Norway has since the late 1980s become multi-cultural. The number of Catholics has increased, making our Catholic population a vocal, considerable part of society. We are no longer as marginal as we were.

Secondly, the cultural climate has changed. A Christian reference used to be natural in public discourse. That is so no more.

An increasing part of the population considers the Church, the churches, as an irrelevance.

We cannot allow ourselves, in these conditions, to put our light under a bushel.

We cannot presume that the memory of Christian hope, Christian values, a Christian understanding of man will be upheld by others.

We must get on with it.

In the light of these twin, indissociable factors, it seems essential that the Catholic Church in Norway should assume an evangelising, missionary character.

It is not a matter of being blusteringly triumphalist — that is counterproductive.

It is a matter of ensuring that Jesus Christ remains credibly represented in our country, that his name is heard. The harvest is plentiful, the labourers few. That is how it was in the beginning, too (Mt 9.37).

We must find a balance between excessive ambition and discouragement.

Above all we must remember that the Church is the Lord's, that he has a plan for it both at the large, global level and at the small, local level.

We must let ourselves be used as tools in his hands so that we, by word and example, may invite others into sustaining fellowship.

I want to point toward three especially important areas: Continue reading

• Erik Varden is a monk and bishop, born in Norway in 1974. In 2002, after ten years at the University of Cambridge, he joined Mount Saint Bernard Abbey in Charnwood Forest. Pope Francis named him bishop of Trondheim in 2019.

They '"let rip" at the Germans.

The Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Iceland Church leaders' letter is an excellent example of one group of bishops seeing the synodal process as another country's "problem."

The Synodal Path "must be seen against the backdrop of the concrete situation in Germany", the Scandinavian bishops argue, because it gives the reason for the "felt demand/need for change".

How else could this be?

Should the German bishops reply to their episcopal confreres about the problems in the Nordic countries?

The Scandinavian bishops want to put themselves on the map and distance themselves from the "German problem".

Their letter begins in a condescending manner that continues throughout as if they bring a depth of learning and insight that is lacking in the German Church.

At the outset, they acknowledge their historical reliance on Germany from the Post-Reformation period, neatly forgetting their much earlier reliance on Germanic Christians.

They also acknowledge their financial dependence on the German Church, which they continue to enjoy.

An attempt to avoid the real challenges and issues

The "immense challenges" facing the Church, according to the Scandinavian bishops, are global and "overpowering" — challenges they wish to "negotiate" or "approach" in faithfulness to Christ.

"Avoid" might have been a more accurate sentiment. The implication of negotiating rather than confronting or addressing is clear, and it sets the overall tone of the bishops' letter.

Although they see the "felt demand for change" in Germany as the hub of the German problem, the issues raised by the Synodal Path are not "purely" or exclusively German.

The Scandinavians acknowledge that the issues raised by the Germans are "overpowering, global challenges for the Church", but as the bishops of the Nordic countries, they take issue with them. They only acknowledge ecclesial sexual abuse as a matter of justice and a Christian imperative.

The implication is that the other issues of priestly life-forms, such as celibacy and formation, the place of women in the Church (ordination and governance), and a broader understanding of sexuality are not matters of justice or Christian imperative for them.

The Scandinavians address sexual abuse with the now hackneyed episcopal condemnations.

They address this issue from the point of justice and Christian imperative because it is the "safe" issue. Safe, because everyone agrees that something should be done, and every bishop wants to be seen to be doing something.

The primary reason for their condemnation is not the ecclesial sin committed against believers but their concern for the continuing believability of the Church.

"Dangerous topics"

Again, they put the institution and the structures that created the sin first. But later in their letter, they seem to want to protect the same structures.

The other issues such as clerical life and formation, women in the Church and teaching on sexuality are treated differently, probably because they demand proactive change rather than reactive apologies.

The problem with these issues — for the Scandinavians — is they touch on the immutability of teaching and, at the same time, reflect the Zeitgeist or spirit of the age. They are "dangerous topics" that should be avoided.

Consequently, the search for answers to these issues needs to be pulled aside and reviewed by the unchangeable elements.

Clearly, the Nordic bishops have not found a dogmatic or Zeitgeist objection to ecclesial sexual abuse.

Given this context, they conclude that the "direction, methodology and content" of the Synodal Path are worrisome.

They accuse the Germans of being driven by "process thinking" and the desire for structural Church change without clearly outlining Prozessdenken and why structural change is problematic.

As a result, both process thinking and structural change are presented negatively because they reduce reform in the Church to a project.

Implicit is the notion that reform is neither structural nor human by design when applied to the Church.

The argument is that Church does change differently from every other human institution. Where the Church becomes an object of human change, it is no longer the subject of God's salvific will.

"Process thinking" and a richer theological debate

Process-thinking is an end-to-end process, that is non-hierarchical in its structure.

According to the Nordic bishops, non-hierarchical thinking threatens the non-changeable sources of Scripture, Tradition, and the Magisterium, and must therefore be eliminated.

The danger of process-thinking is that it can break down sacred theological silos and open discrete theological categories to investigation and scrutiny.

But on the positive side, process-thinking can enable a richer theological debate, better theology and Church structures, thus optimizing Church life.

Concretely, this means having laypeople sitting beside bishops making decisions in a fundamental "equality of equals."

Some would argue that this is a model of the early Church, while others would disagree.

By contrast, the Scandinavian bishops appear to want to disempower the image or metaphor of the People of God. They write that this is "only one of the images with which the living Tradition describes the Church".

That's true, but it is a crucial image or metaphor of the Second Vatican Council's Dogmatic Constitution on the Church.

A Church with passive members

The Scandinavian bishops suggest three other images should be used to describe the Church

• Corpus mysterium
• Bride of Christ and
• Mediatrix of graces.

These are more passive and receptive than they are active and dynamic.

The curious metaphor of the Church as the "mediatrix of graces" is a reference I have not found in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC).

They might be meaning that the Church "is like a sacrament" (CCC 775) and "as a sacrament, the Church is Christ's instrument" (CCC 776). If so, their theology is unclear and needs greater precision.

Having not paid sufficient attention to the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, the bishops have missed other vital images of the Church that Pope Francis has used explicitly and implicitly.

These include the Church as sheepfold and Christ as the shepherd; the Church as God's farm or field and God the heavenly farmer; the Church as building; the Church as Pilgrim People; and the Church as Body, for whom the "one mediator is Christ" (Lumen Gentium 6-8).

I believe the Scandinavians are correct to say that the Church "cannot be merely defined by the visible community".

But neither can it be defined without it.

For some, addressing the day's issues might be a capitulation to the current Zeitgeist. Still, for others, this is "reading the signs of the times".

The type of Catholic the Scandinavian bishops appeal to—and want the German bishops to hear—are those who sit quietly in their parishes with a strong sense of sacramental mystery.

These people "carry and set" the life of parishes and communities. They are not people who engage in questionnaires and debates, the bishops say, to defend them.

There is a "quietest" element to this type of person and a sense that the person who keeps his or her head firmly in the snow is the true type of Catholic.

Radical conversion and a radical image of God

But are these the people with whom Pope Francis wants us to communicate? His message is more outward-focused, asking us to engage with the sheep who have left the farm.

Consequently, the reference to Lumen Gentium 9 is double-edged.

How does the Church, in Christ's name, "approach the world and be its sure hope and source of salvation" if it does not also engage with the questions and push-back of the people of this age? Is it sufficient to live the ad intra life of the Church in peace and serenity by ignoring the ad extra "mess" we call human society?

The Scandinavian bishops then return to the "German problem" and the crisis of the German Church and its potential for renewal.

Condescendingly, they remember the dead saints, the past German theologians, and the humble and obscure German missionaries as examples of the life-giving patrimony of rich blessing for the Church in Germany.

Although they write of the need for radical conversion, they seem to want to avoid radical conversion that isn't spiritualised.

They misunderstand that the image of the People of God is a radical image of God, not of the people!

In this image, God is not the property of the people, but the people are the chosen of God.

Regarding the mission of the Church, the Scandinavians have forgotten that the Church — the People of God — are called to be salt and light for the world through living immersed in the world.

People sitting safely at home not participating in the life of the Church cannot be the synodal image of Scandinavian Catholicism the bishops wish to promote, can they?

The Scandinavian bishops should send another letter apologizing to the German Church.

They could explain why they are so frightened of facing the world's reality and why they want to hide from key contemporary questions.

Joe Grayland is a theologian and a priest of the Diocese of Palmerston North. His latest book is: Liturgical Lockdown. Covid and the Absence of the Laity. (Te Hepara Pai, 2021).

In addition, Oslo diocese's chief administrative officer has been charged with aggravated fraud.

The Government in Norway finances the churches. The amount they pay is in proportion to the number of church members.

Accusers say the Oslo diocese searched telephone books to build up their imaginary membership.

They say the diocese targeted immigrants' whose names appeared to come from Catholic countries.

They were then listed as Catholic church members without their knowledge.

The fraud is alleged to have occurred between 2011 and 2014.

As a result of this alleged activity, the church has been able to get more money from the Government than it would otherwise be due.

If the diocese refuses to pay the fine it will have to face trial.

The Norwegian Government also wants the Catholic church to refund 40.6m kroner (NZ $8,168,941.) which they say has been overpaid.

"We've never done anything illegal or received too much money," the Catholic church said in a statement.

"We have always recognised that we have made mistakes and had an unfortunate practice in parts of our registration. This was cleaned up a long [time] ago."

Source

• The Local
• The Guardian
• Image: Catholic News Agency

The move comes after the governing synod of Norway's predominant Lutheran Church voted to allow gay marriages.

Catholic Bishop Bernt Eidsvig of Oslo said "it's clear we must distinguish our own church marriages from others".

Continue reading

The diocese has been accused of vastly exaggerating its membership to increase the support it receives from the state.

This came to an additional 50 million Norwegian Krone, some NZD$8.58 million, over four years.

The Bishop of Oslo, Bernt Ivar Eidsvig, and the diocesan finance officer are suspects in the case.

The diocese allegedly added 65,000 people to its membership by lifting immigrants' names from the telephone directory without their consent.

This doubled the number of Catholics living in the country.

Bishop Eidsvig said that the diocese had been trying to record the Catholics who came to live in the majority-Lutheran country and never intended to do anything illegal.

Continue reading

In the years since the Columbine massacre of 1999, the dramatically increased frequency of these killings has had the effect of crystallizing this category in our collective consciousness.

When I heard about the massacres carried out this year in Tuscon and Norway, I was no less horrified than I was when I heard about Columbine, but now I feel I like can more readily name what happened. I feel like the conceptual "box" into which I place these kinds of events is more defined and accessible. And judging by the increased rapidity with which these killings have become political weapons, it would appear that the wider public is also getting better at "making sense" of this sort of violence.

Yet from a theological perspective, I wonder whether the attempt to make sense of these events is not misguided at some level.

Of course, we can and should make moral distinctions between certain types of killing, between murder and self-defence, for instance, or between terrorism and justified revolution.

Such distinctions, however, are presumably based upon the more fundamental distinction between good and evil, which in the Christian view is not a distinction between two categories of being, but rather one between being and its privation.

When it comes to killing, though, privation is always involved, insofar as killing names the act that deprives a living thing of its life.

When it comes to killing, then, we are not really distinguishing between "good" and "evil", as much as drawing a line between "permissible" and "impermissible" - a line that marks the point where we become responsible for the loss of life that results from an act of killing, the point where that privation becomes attributable to us in a way that makes us sharers in it.

In other words, murder is murder because it represents privation in both the victim and the murderer. For Christians, death is never an unqualified good, and so killing can never be an act of perfect virtue; the real question is whether or not the evil involved in an act of killing overtakes the one who carries it out.

And to the extent that Christians also believe intelligbility to be equally controvertible with being and goodness, there is always going to be an element of the absurd lurking within any act of killing.

The violent loss of life involved in such acts always pulls them toward unintelligibility.

So it should be no surprise then that the more evil such an act is, the more unintelligible it becomes. The act of shooting unarmed civilians can dress up in a variety of justifications-written in a 1500-page manifesto, perhaps-but at its core we ultimately find no ratio, no basis in any real and positive good. What we find there is madness: a lack of any true intelligibility.

And yet as has so often been the case in our history, we seek to quantify that madness and orient it toward some political or social end.

Most recently, the madness of Anders Breivik has been used to associate conservative political views with "extremist violence."

Given the references in Breivik's writings to conservative thinkers, I can completely understand the tendency to make this connection, but what it misses in my view is the deep evil involved in this act, and the privation, absurdity and desperation that attends such evil.

Continue reading "Can we make sense out of of killing sprees"

Source

• Image: Peter Daou - Progressive Politics Blog

Religious and political conservatives have for some years sought to connect Islam to violence, and the premature portrayal of the terror attacks as the work of Muslims has left some conservatives 'red-faced.'

Mark Juergensmeyer, author "Terror in the Mind of God," noted close parallels between the 32-year-old Norwegian man, Anders Behring Breivik, who killed at least 76 people in coordinated attacks on government buildings in Oslo and a youth rally at a nearby island, and Timothy McVeigh, the anti-government radical behind the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

"If [Osama] bin Laden is a Muslim terrorist, Breivik and McVeigh are surely Christian ones," Juergensmeyer, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, wrote on the blog Religion Dispatches.

Perhaps the best lesson - for conservatives and everyone else looking for obvious culprits and easy answers - came from a Norwegian woman who visited the devastation in Oslo.

"If Islamic people do something bad, you think, 'Oh, it's Muslims'?" Sigrid Skeie Tjensvoll told The Washington Post. "But if a white Protestant does something bad, you just think he's mad. That's something we need to think about."

In his manifesto, written just hours before the killings, Breivik quoted Sydney Archbishop, Cardinal George Pell as a source of his 'Christian' motivation.

Quoting a speech Pell gave post September 11, Breivik wrote, "in the relationship between the Islamic and non-Islamic world, the normal thing is a situation of tension if not war, or outright hostility".

Sources

• Huffington Post
• SMH
• Religion Dispatches

The danger of such speculation is that it adds little knowledge but causes real harm by spreading fear and loathing of Muslims, immigrants and other vulnerable and routinely demonized populations, and whether intentional or not, assigns collective guilt to them.

"Experts" who supposedly study this topic — almost always white men and very often with military or government backgrounds — direct suspicion toward Muslims by pointing to claims of responsibility on "jihadi" web sites that only they have access to. Notorious attacks invariably inspire false claims of responsibility, or false reports of claims of responsibility, but this apparently doesn't discourage the media and experts from giving them undue attention.

Continue reading how a clueless terrorism expert set media suspicion on Muslims after Oslo horror

Sources

• Image: Electronic Intifada