Catholic Immigrants
The Catholic Church remained very much a minority church of a few thousand people right up to the decades following World War II. Around the country, the local congregations consisted of a few families each. However, with increased immigration from the 1960s onwards, the Catholic Church grew quickly: from 6,000 in 1966 to 40,000 in 1996 and to over 200,000 in 2013.
At first, the immigrants came from Germany, The Netherlands, and France. Immigration from Chile, the Philippines, and from a wide range of other countries began in the 1970s. Among the largest groups are Vietnamese and Tamils. This development has further increased after 2008 with a high number of economic immigrants from Poland and Lithuania.
Read more about this topic: Roman Catholicism In Norway
Famous quotes containing the words catholic and/or immigrants:
“You do not mean by mystery what a Catholic does. You mean an interesting uncertainty: the uncertainty ceasing interest ceases also.... But a Catholic by mystery means an incomprehensible certainty: without certainty, without formulation there is no interest;... the clearer the formulation the greater the interest.”
—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)
“Even American women are not felt to be persons in the same sense as the male immigrants among the Hungarians, Poles, Russian Jews,—not to speak of Italians, Germans, and the masters of all of us—the Irish!”
—Mary Putnam Jacobi (1842–1906)