Roman Catholic Church in Sweden - Membership

Membership

Members of the Swedish Catholic Church can be divided in six main groups, in order from largest to smallest:

• Poles,
• Croats,
• Spanish language speakers,
• Syriac language speakers,
• Ethnic Swedes, and
• Others. (Regarding "others" it should be mentioned that even in the smallest Catholic congregations in towns with populations under 100,000 there are, percentage wise within each congregation, quite substantial African and Asian memberships.)

The Polish members are most numerous, and in most parishes people of Polish descent can be found. In the larger towns they have their own masses, and in Stockholm one of the Protestant churches is used twice on Sunday since the Catholic churches are too small. Approximately one in three priests (42 of 150) are born in Poland, and several others are Swedish-born but of Polish descent.

Croatian believers from Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina also typically have their own priests, a number which increased during the wars that followed the break-up of Yugoslavia.

Spanish speakers typically come from South America, mainly Chile, and most were political refugees who never fully integrated. Since most of the Chilean exiles were Marxists or secular liberals, they generally are not active church members. Their number has been increased with immigrants from Central America.

Since the 1980s an increasing number of people of Middle Eastern descent have arrived in Sweden, and in Greater Stockholm each Sunday there are several Divine Liturgies in the Melkite, Maronite, Chaldean, Armenian and Syrian Eastern Rites. Swedish-born priests from these groups also exist, and the first Swedish-born Maronite priest was ordained in August 2002 in Beirut. (The Armenian Roman Catholics are primarily from Poland, and not from the older Armenian Catholic Church.)

Of the roughly 200,000 Catholics, very few are actually ethnically Swedish. In fact, the current Bishop of Stockholm, Anders Arborelius, is the first ethnically Swedish Catholic bishop in Europe since the Reformation. However, ethnic Swedes, most of which are converts from Lutheranism, do form a majority of the traditionalist Catholics in the country.