Catholic Church in Norway

The Catholic Church in Norway is part of the worldwide Catholic Church. , there were 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. Structure The Catholic Church is the second largest religious community in Norway by number of registered members. The country is divided into three Church districts – the Diocese of Oslo and the prelatures of Trondheim and Tromsø, whose bishops participate in the Scandinavian Bishops Conference. The country is further divided into 38 parishes and three chapel districts. 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.