This short essay is about the Church in Scandinavia in the post Vatican II era. The main focus will be on Denmark, my country of origin and residence. The number of registered Catholics in Scandinavia today is: 45,000 in Denmark, 100,000 in Sweden and 120,000 in Norway. The actual number is probably much higher since there are many migrant workers (seasonal and permanent) from other European countries with Catholic majority (e.g. Poland).

The Church has changed considerably since the mid-1960s, both due to internal and external influences. Since the introduction of religious freedom in Scandinavia in the mid-nineteenth century the Church was heavily dependent on foreign clergy and religious. They built up the national Catholic churches, which attracted converts in all countries (e.g. Sigrid Undset and Johannes Jørgensen). The religious orders also ran hospitals and schools. Until the mid-twentieth century the small Catholic Church was a perfect example of a creative sub-culture in what the philosopher Charles Taylor has named “The Age of Mobilization”. This changed with the 1960s, Vatican II and the so-called youth revolt.

The Scandinavian countries are extremely secularized and although the national Lutheran churches have retained high membership rates, church attendance is extremely low (1 to 5 %) and adherence to the most basic Christian doctrines is low. With the changes of the 1960s this trend came to affect the Catholic Church as well. In Denmark half of the priests left the priesthood in the years following 1968 and whole religious communities (e.g. the Dominicans) disintegrated. Similar situations occurred in the other Scandinavian countries. Many Catholics gradually stopped attending mass and many eventually abandoned their formal Church membership. Although Scandinavian Catholic churches were in the forefront of implementing the Vatican II reforms, the often anti-Christian and anti-authoritarian draw of the time was stronger.

In the 1970s and 1980s new Catholic refugees and immigrants arrived in Scandinavia, mostly Vietnamese, Chileans and Tamils. With the increasing globalization of the 1990’s and 2000’s Catholic migrants from all over the world arrived, the main groups being Eastern European (Polish and Lithuanian) and South-East-Asian (e.g. Filipinas au pairs). The vast majority of Catholics in Scandinavia today thus have another ethnic or national background. This has created truly global local churches in Scandinavia, where it is not uncommon that more that forty different nationalities celebrate the Eucharist together. Though many masses are celebrated in different foreign languages for migrant groups, the Scandinavian languages have become the lingua franca of both worship and social life in the parishes. The huge influx of migrants does not normally cause disagreement, but it has to some degree eradicated the ‘inculturated’ Scandinavian forms of Catholicism that characterized the situation prior to Vatican II. A new, multicultural, form of Scandinavian Catholicism is emerging these years and herein we find all the tendencies we find in the global Catholicism: New Evangelization efforts with stress on conversion, personal piety, and a slightly more Charismatic form of worship. In Denmark the Neo-catechumenal Way has opened a seminary and a considerable number of new priests (often of Spanish or Italian origin) stem from that movement. This has created some tensions in some parishes. Another observation is the relative success of Traditionalist group in organizing Latin masses and catechesis after the motu proprium of Pope Benedict. There seems to be a growing number of converts who are attracted to this form of Catholic worship.

To sum up: The Church in Scandinavia has become more pluralist, and more multicultural. Likewise it has become more urban with growing parishes in the cities and bigger towns and a decrease in the parishes in the smaller towns.