Roman Catholic Church in Norway - From Reformation Till 1843

From Reformation Till 1843

The Lutheran Reformation in Norway lasted from 1526 to 1536. Catholic Church property and the personal property of Catholic priests was confiscated by the Crown. Catholic priests were exiled and imprisoned unless they submitted to conversion to the Danish king's faith. Bishop Jon Arason of Holar, executed in 1550, was the last Catholic bishop of Iceland (until the establishment of the Diocese of Reykjavik in 1923). The Bishop of Hamar from 1513 to 1537, Mogens Lauritsson, was imprisoned until his death in 1542.

Many traditions from the Catholic Middle Ages continued for centuries more. In the late 18th century and into the 19th century, a strict and puritan interpretation of the Lutheran faith, inspired by the preacher Hans Nielsen Hauge, spread through Norway, and popular religious practices turned more purely Lutheran.

The Catholic Church per se, however, was not allowed to operate in Norway between 1537 and 1843, and throughout most of this period, Catholic priests faced execution. In 1582 the scattered Catholics in Norway and elsewhere in Northern Europe were placed under the jurisdiction of a papal nuncio in Cologne, however, with threatening punishment Catholic pastoring could not materialise. In the late 16th century, a few incidents of crypto-Catholicism occurred within the Lutheran Church of Norway.

The Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, on its establishment in 1622, took charge of the vast Northern European missionary field, which - at its third session - it divided among the nuncio of Brussels (for the Catholics in Denmark and Norway), the nuncio at Cologne (much of Northern Germany) and the nuncio to Poland (Finland, Mecklenburg, and Sweden).

In 1688 Norway became part of the Apostolic Vicariate of the Nordic Missions. The Paderborn bishops functioned as administrators of the apostolic vicariate. Christiania (Oslo) had an illegal but tolerated Catholic congregation in the 1790s. Rests of Roman Catholic faith survived in remote parts of the Kingdom until approximately 1800.

In 1834 the Catholic missions in Norway became part of the Apostolic Vicariate of Sweden, seated in the Swedish capital Stockholm. In 1843 the Norwegian Parliament passed a religious tolerance act providing for limited religious freedom and allowing for legal non-Lutheran public religious services for the first time since the Reformation.