Roman Catholicism in Norway
| Catholic Church in Norway | |
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| Classification | Catholic Church |
| Region | Norway |
| Origin | 934 A.D. |
The Catholic Church in Norway is part of the worldwide Catholic Church, under the spiritual leadership of the Pope, the Curia in Rome and the Scandinavian Bishops Conference.
There were, as of May 2014, over 151,000 registered Catholics in Norway. It is claimed there are many Catholics who are not registered with their personal identification number and who are not reported by the local church; the full number may be as high as 230,000, 70% of whom were born abroad. That constitutes about 5% of the population, making Norway the most Catholic country in Nordic Europe.
However, in early 2015, the Bishop of Oslo was charged with fraud for reporting to the government as many as 65,000 names of people claimed as members of the church who had not actually signed up. As the government gives a subsidy to religious organizations according to the number of members, the diocese was ordered to repay the government. The government reports for January 2015 that there were 95,655 registered Catholics, down from the 140,109 reported for January 2014.
The country is divided into three Church districts – the Diocese of Oslo and the prelatures of Trondheim and Tromsø, and these three consist of 35 parishes. At least two more are about to come, a fourth one in the city of Oslo (St. Martin) and one in Valdres (St. Thomas, by now a chapel district), both in the diocese of Oslo. At least one more parish has been planned in Bergen for several years, but the plans remain on hold. The Catholic Church is the second largest religious community in Norway by number of registered members.
Four religious orders have returned to Norway: the Cistercians, Dominicans, the Poor Clares, and the Trappistines. In 2007, monks from the Abbey of Cîteaux dedicated a new monastery at Frol near Levanger in Nord-Trøndelag, naming it Munkeby Mariakloster. Trappistine nuns, likewise, bought land near the ruins of a pre-Reformation monastery on the island of Tautra in the Trondheimsfjord, moved to the site and built a new cloister, workplace, guesthouse and chapel, calling the new monastery Tautra Mariakloster. In addition to these four, 17 other orders are also working in the country, for instance the Sisters of St. Francis Xavier (Franciskussøstre), which is a unique order as it was founded in Norway in 1901. The Benedictines, who had a monastery on the island of Selja in the Medieval ages, were asked to return to Norway.
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