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William J. Tighe:
Associate Professor of History, Muhlenberg College, PA
Swedish strife The disestablishment of the state church offers little relief to the orthodox dissidents within it An abridged version was published in Touchstone in March 2003(PART I) Although the Church of Sweden was disestablished asof January 1, 2000, the process by which it came about appears to have consolidated the hold of the “liberal establishment” upon it, and offered little hope of better treatment to the marginalized “traditionalists” within it, barring the collapse of the church structure itself, which some of them foresee in the next decade or two. Of the present-day Swedish
population of just over 8,850,000 (of whom 7.6 million are nominal members
of the Church of Sweden), only about 260,000 (just under 3%) attend any
church regularly. The latest statistics, from 1999, reveal that almost
exactly half of these (129,732 to be precise) attend the Church of Sweden,
while the rest go to Free Churches of various kinds, to the Catholic
Church or to Orthodox Churches. Those who go to the Church of Sweden
weekly --assuming that these 130,000 attend weekly, which is probably an
overly optimistic assessment —- amount to little more than 1.7% of the
church’s nominal membership, and surveys have shown that about 50,000 of
these churchgoers, or ca. 39% of their total, are committed “conservative
Church of Sweden Christians” of one sort or another (Lutheran
confessionalists; Lutheran pietists; or high-church “evangelical
catholics”), who regard the retired Bishop of Gothenburg, Bertil Gaertner,
the last “orthodox” bishop in the Church of Sweden, as “their bishop”. The
bureaucratic apparatus of the church is firmly under liberal control,
however, even after disestablishment, and the thirteen bishops run the
gamut from liberal to radical, while Karl-Gustav Hammar, the Archbishop of
Uppsala since February 1997, has been described as a “radical
Postmodernist”.
For over forty years the ordination of women has been a
continuing source of strife in the Swedish Church, with opposition to it
among the clergy holding steady at about a quarter of all serving clergy
and, until recently, claiming an increasing number of male ordinands; as
of 1999, ordained women comprise nearly 30% of the active clergy (1,175
out of 3,956), or 24% of all clergy (1,306 out of 5,442). Now, however,
ordination had been effectively barred to all opponents by the terms of
the disestablishment, and with the recent advent of women bishops and a
concurrent drive to secure the acceptance of “same-sex partnerships” and
their “blessing” by the church, tensions have increased further.
Underground congregations, or koinonias, are in the process of formation
within, and yet in defiance of, the Church of Sweden, while the “orthodox
opposition” vacillates between revolt and departure. Scandinavia in the Middle Ages consisted of three kingdoms, Denmark, Norway and Sweden, all of which were converted from paganism to western Latin Catholic Christianity in the decades before and after the year 1000. What is today Finland was largely conquered by Sweden beginning around 1150 and Iceland, a Viking republic which had been settled largely from Norway beginning in 876 and which had peacefully converted to Christianity in 1000, accepted Norwegian overlordship around 1250. (Norway was separated from Denmark in 1814 and united loosely with Sweden; it became an independent monarchy in 1905. Sweden was forced to cede Finland to Russia in 1809; Finland became an independent republic in 1918. Iceland became a republic independent of Denmark in 1944.) All three kingdoms were loosely united into one monarchy in 1397 with each constituent part retaining its own institutions, but this union effectively dissolved in the 1520s after the brutal behavior of the Danish king Christian II after his conquest of Sweden in 1520 led to a Swedish revolt which raised the Swedish nobleman Gustav Vasa (1496-1560) to the position of king of Sweden and subsequently to Christian’s overthrow in Denmark in 1523 by his uncle Frederick, who became king of Denmark and Norway. When Frederick died in 1533 the attempt of the Catholic portion of the nobility and the higher clergy to prevent the succession of his strongly Lutheran son Christian led to a three-year civil war which ended with the triumph of Christian III and of Lutheranism alike. The triumph of Lutheranism in Denmark in 1536 was followed by its imposition upon Norway and Iceland over the next two decades, and although it took decades for it to strike any substantial roots in these latter realms, its “official” triumph was swift and complete, and the Lutheran Churches in them became effectively an arm of the state. In
Sweden the process was much slower. Although Gustav Vasa had initially
made opposition to “Lutheran heresy” a part of his popular appeal, he soon
showed strong anticlerical tendencies and a desire to strip the Swedish
church of its wealth and autonomy. After 1527 communication with the
papacy ceased and bishops were chosen and consecrated without reference to
Rome (until 1540, that is; after that date the king appointed no more
bishops in Sweden and seemed to be aiming at letting the episcopate die
out. It was only his allowing two bishops to be appointed in Finland in
1554 that allowed any sort of succession to be continued in 1575). King
Gustav never displayed any interest in theology, although by the end of
his life he had learned to brand as “papistic” any displays of clerical
initiative or resistance to his wishes. Under the cautious leadership of
the more-or—less Lutheran Archbishop of Uppsala, Laurentius Petri (born
1499; archbishop 1531-1573) Lutheran beliefs and liturgical forms slowly
made their way into the Swedish church, although no formal Lutheran
confession of faith was adopted until 1593. Some of Gustav Vasa’s
immediate successors were partial to Catholicism, others to Calvinism. The
end result of it all was a Lutheran State Church under the authority of
the Swedish Crown, but with a good deal more institutional identity than
the churches of the neighboring kingdoms.
The apostolic succession of
bishops had been deliberately broken in the Danish Reformation and in
Norway and Iceland, but the Swedish Church claims to have retained it,
albeit by a hair’s breadth -- a claim recognized by the Church of England
in 1920, but denied by Orthodoxy and Rome alike -- without, however, any
assertion (in fact, with an explicit denial) that such a succession of
bishops is in any sense necessary to the being of a church. Bishops have
been viewed in all the Scandinavian Lutheran churches as members of the
one ordained order of “pastors” exercising an office of supervision within
the church, not as a separate “order” of ordained ministry -- a view to
which the disappearance of the diaconate as an ordained ministry in the
course of the Swedish Reformation also contributed.
Until
the beginning of this year, before the Swedish disestablishment, all of
the Scandinavian states had established Lutheran churches, and all except
Sweden still have them. The nature of the establishment varied from
country to country, ranging from Denmark, where the “Danish Folkchurch” is
still in many respects an arm of the civil service, with no general synod
or other deliberative body than the Danish Parliament, to Finland, where
the two established churches, the dominant Lutheran Church and the smaller
Orthodox Church enjoy a large measure of autonomy and self-government.
Until about 1960 Sweden might have been reckoned as closer by far to the
Finnish end of this spectrum than to the Danish end. Sweden, also, in the
middle decades of the Twentieth Century, was the scene of a remarkable
theological florescence in the academic and pastoral realms. Names
associated with it include, in the field of Biblical exegesis, Anton
Friedrichsen, Birger Gerhardsson and Harald Riesenfeld and, in that of
dogmatic theology, Gustav Aulen and Anders Nygren —- not to mention the
work in liturgics of Yngve Brilioth, subsequently Archbishop of Uppsala
(1950-1959). These all identified themselves with the Lutheran tradition
of the Swedish Church (although Riesenfeld, who ceased to function as a
priest after the ordination of women began, in later life became a
Catholic), and often consciously stood in opposition to the more “radical”
theological and exegetical trends emanating from German academic
theologians such as Bultmann and Kasemann. There was, at the same time, a
degree of influence emanating from high-church or moderately
Anglo-Catholic English sources upon the liturgical and sacramental
practice of the Swedish Church. On the other hand, beginning early in the
last quarter of the Nineteenth Century and gathering speed for nearly
fifty years Sweden experienced a catastrophic decline in church attendance
and religious practice that was to end with regular churchgoers numbering
rather less than 10% of the population. A veneer of selectively-held
Christian attitudes and “values” persisted among sections of the social
elite into the 1950s or early 60s, and for a time various
evangelical/revivalistic denominations, home-grown or imported from
America, drew support from the more pietistic elements of the State
Church; these, too, have by the present day mostly gone liberal.
But by
the late 1940s it began to appear as though the situation had stabilized,
and it was thus that leading Swedish churchmen of the period anticipated
this consolidation leading to a recovery of ground. There is some evidence
(such as the furious reaction in the press and at large to the publication
in 1950 by the Church of Sweden’s bishops of a pastoral letter condemning
premarital sex, extramarital cohabitation, and homosexuality, and
rejecting, save in exceptional circumstances, abortion, divorce and the
use of contraception) that this view may have been unduly optimistic, but
it was not until the Swedish Government thrust the women’s ordination
issue upon the church in 1957 that the predicament of the Church of Sweden
as the Established Church of a post-Christian society became painfully
evident. In
1945 the Swedish Parliament passed an “Equal Rights Law” guaranteeing men
and women equal employment rights, and in 1946 requested a study of the
question of the ordination of women, since the State Church clergy were
reckoned as part of the Swedish civil service to whom the law applied, but
it would require action by the Church Assembly, which had the legal right
to accept or to veto civil legislation applying to the church, to effect
the change. The issue had already arisen decades earlier, but a motion to
approve the ordination of women had been tabled in 1923 after a long
debate in the Church Assembly. A Royal Commission was appointed; in 1950
it produced a majority report recommending their ordination and a minority
report opposing it. Shortly after its appearance, the majority’s
recommendations were strongly attacked in a statement signed by all the
theology professors save one at the two Swedish universities, Lund and
Uppsala. After a vigorous, but not vitriolic, debate, the Swedish
Government made a formal proposal to the 1957 Church Assembly meeting that
the exception made in 1925 for the Church of Sweden to a law allowing
women to hold all civil service offices on an equal basis with men be
repealed; to accept this proposal (which would subsequently have to be
passed by the Swedish Parliament) would effectively open ordination to
women. At that time (until a major reorganization of its structure and
composition in 1982) the Church Assembly, which normally met once every
five years, consisted of 100 voting members: the 13 Swedish bishops, who
were members by virtue of their office, 30 clergy elected by the clergy on
a diocesan basis and 57 elected layfolk. The members voted as a single
body, and not separately by “orders” (as in the Church of England), and a
bare majority sufficed to carry a proposal. At the October 1957 Church
Assembly meeting the proposal was defeated by a vote of 62 against to 36
for: all 13 bishops voted against, all but one of the clergy delegates and
21 of the 57 lay delegates. This came as an astonishing shock to public
opinion: all the political parties in Sweden had come out in favor of the
proposal, and the lay (but not clergy) delegates to the Church Assembly
were mostly elected under the same political party “labels” as were the
members of the Swedish Parliament, and a tremendous uproar ensued in the
press and the political world in general. In retrospect, it appears that
the bishops and clergy regarded the proposal as a secular intrusion into
the internal life of the church, while Swedish public opinion in general,
thinking that the proposal was so obviously in accord with “modern times”
and “Swedish ideals”, had found it impossible to imagine that it would
have been rejected.
In December 1957 the Minister for Ecclesiastical
Affairs (a Cabinet Minister of the Swedish Government) called for new
elections for a special session of the Church Assembly to meet in
September 1958 to reconsider the proposal; meanwhile, the Swedish
Parliament passed the proposed act, and it rested with the Church Assembly
to accept or to veto it. The elections were fought vigorously, with
something of a crusading attitude on the part of the proponents of the
measure, and the governing Social Democratic Party clearly intimated that
in the case of a refusal to endorse the proposal the Church of Sweden
would be disestablished and most of its assets confiscated by the state -—
or at the very least the State Church would lose its veto over
church-related legislation and come totally under government control, as
was (and is) the case in Denmark. When the vote came, this time it passed
by a vote of 69 in favor to 29 opposed. Six of the 13 bishops who had
voted against a year earlier now voted in favor, five voted against and
one abstained. The Archbishop of Uppsala, Brilioth, was gravely ill; in
his absence the Dean of Uppsala, Olof Herrlin, cast a proxy vote against
on the archbishop’s behalf (the archbishop himself had opined that the the
vote should take place only after wide ecumenical consultations). The
Drafting Committee of the 1958 Church Assembly included in the act
authorizing the ordination of women a “conscience clause” designed to
guarantee that no bishop could be forced to ordain women, nor could a
candidate be denied ordination because of his opposition to the ordination
of women; and the Minister for Ecclesiastical Affairs, Ragnar Edenmann,
made a formal declaration on behalf of the government that the “conscience
clause” would have legal force. Then there was a pause of over a year, in
the course of which opposition began to coalesce into an organized group
and a new archbishop, Gunnar Hultgren, one of the bishops who had voted in
favor of the ordination of women after having opposed it a year earlier,
was appointed. Finally, on Palm Sunday 1960 the archbishop and two other
bishops each ordained a woman. Early
in 1960 the “opposition” prepared a document popularly called The 17
Points. This was a recommended “code of practice” for clergy and laity of
the Church of Sweden opposed to the ordination of women. It was formulated
largely by Bo Giertz (1906-1998), from 1949 to 1970 Bishop of Gothenburg
in southwestern Sweden -- a region of a relatively high level of religious
practice compared with the rest of Sweden and within the Swedish Church a
stronghold of strongly confessionalist Lutheranism -- and one of the five
bishops who had stood firm in 1958. It was withheld from publication until
the first ordinations of women, and its release at the same time as those
first ordinations caused an uproar in the press. The following excerpt
from the introduction and from points 1, 2, 9 (the first nine were for
clergy, the remaining eight for the laity) 10, 11, and 12 demonstrate
their nature: Through its decision to open the priesthood to women the Church Assembly has introduced into the Church those not rightly called to the office and not authorized to practice it on Christ’s behalf... 1. Priests aware that the ordination of women goes against the command of the Lord obviously cannot assist at such an ordination and they ought to avoid being present. The last part of this advice is valid also for the laity. 2. Since a woman does not administer the office at the command of Christ, a priest cannot exercise his priestly service together with her, nor can he cooperate at the same service, nor go before the altar together with her, nor celebrate communion or any other church services, ordination, etc. 9. ….. a member of a Diocesan Council must oppose a woman’s being accepted for examination and ordination. Further, he must refuse to examine her. He cannot be party to the employment of an ordained woman, or in any other way concede that she be treated as a person properly called to the priestly office. 10. The laity ought to abstain from attending a service performed by a woman priest. 11. No children should be sent to a confirmation class conducted by a woman priest. 12. She ought not to be asked for counseling or for sickbed communion. …. Down to 1978, when there were roughly 275 women priests out of a total of 3,000, most bishops were willing to conduct, if with some reluctance, separate ordination services for male ordinands opposed to the ordination of women and, thus, unwilling to be ordained alongside women. On the other hand, from the beginning the government made clear its unwillingness to appoint as bishops clergymen opposed to the ordination of women if that were possible. Bishops were selected by an electoral body consisting of most of the clergy of the diocese concerned, plus one layperson from each parish. The names of the three candidates receiving the largest number of votes were submitted to the government, which then was free to appoint any one of them. The five bishops who had voted against the ordination of women in 1958 retired or died between 1958 and 1971. Only two bishops opposed to the ordination of women were appointed in these years, Olof Herrlin to Visby in 1961 and Bertil Gaertner as Bo Giertz’s successor in Gothenburg in 1970, cases in which all three men on the short list were opposed. Herrlin stuck to his principles during his twenty-year episcopate, but otherwise made no great mark on the ecclesiastical scene, but Bertil Gaertner became in his way the inspiration of the “orthodox opposition” in the Church of Sweden during and after his years as bishop. The End of the “Conscience Clause” and a New Church AssemblyThe
1970s, although it ended in Sweden with the Social Democrats losing power
for the first time since 1932, was a decade of institutional change in
Sweden. A new constitution stripped the monarchy of its last remaining
political powers, and altered the law of succession so as make the crown
descend to the oldest child rather than the oldest son of the reigning
monarch. The Social Democrats had long been committed to the idea of
disestablishing the State Church, but when they, as the governing party,
put the idea in a formal way to the church in the middle of the decade,
the Church Assembly of 1979 refused total disestablishment, but agreed to
undertake major institutional changes in the church’s organization and
government.
By 1978, also, the conscience clause was widely under attack
as “discriminatory”, and a growing number of bishops were refusing to
conduct separate ordination services for ordinands opposed to the
ordination of women. In that year, the then Archbishop of Uppsala, Olof
Sundby, set up a commission of six members, drawn from both
constituencies, to reconsider the conscience clause. In December of that
year the archbishop promulgated Rules for cooperation in the Church of
Sweden between those who hold different opinions concerning the right of
women to ordination. The document stated that the ordination of women was
the norm in the church, but that “those who hold another opinion
concerning a woman’s right to ordination than that which the church’s law
proclaims shall also in the future be able to be ordained and to obtain a
position as a priest in the Church of Sweden”. It went on to state,
however, that the option of separate ordination services for those opposed
would cease, and that those in that position might be able to seek
ordination in a diocese in which there were no women ordinands, but that
this was not to be considered a guarantee; further stipulating that clergy
opposed to the ordination of women might abstain from doing liturgical
service with woman priests, but had to cooperate in all other respects
(for example, administrative or financial) with them. An oblique statement
that “The person who accepts becoming a bishop must be willing to be a
bishop for both male and female priests in the diocese” seemed implicitly
to rule out any candidacy for the episcopate of men opposed to the
ordination of women, while another allowed woman candidates from dioceses
whose bishops would not ordain women to be ordained in another diocese for
service in the diocese of the bishop who was unwilling to ordain her.
These guidelines were accepted by the 1979 Church Assembly, but when they
were sent on to the Parliament for legal enactment the government refused
to accept them, choosing instead to appoint a committee to investigate the
status of women priests in the State Church and to make recommendations.
When the committee reported in 1981 it recommended the abolition of the
1958 law allowing the ordination of women, and with it the conscience
clause which was a part of it. This would have the effect of making the
general “Equal Rights Law” of 1945 (itself incorporated into the 1975
Swedish Constitution) binding upon the Church of Sweden, as its clergy
were considered part of the civil service. It would not of itself prohibit
the ordination of opponents, but it would remove all legal safeguards
ensuring their access to ordination, and effectively leave it up to the
bishops or the Church Assembly to set policy in this area. After a long
debate, on May 11, 1982, the Church Assembly accepted the government’s
proposal. While the opposition was in no sense proscribed by this act,
Archbishop Sundby’s declaration that “all priests should cooperate with
each other in all priestly functions” was hardly reassuring to its
members. It
was in 1982, also, that the old hundred-member Church Assembly was
replaced with a 251-member one, of which the members were chosen by
indirect elections (i.e., electors were elected on a parochial level, and
these electors, in turn, elected delegates to the Church Assembly on
ballot-lists on which most of the political parties were represented). No
longer did the bishops have ex officio membership: all 13 bishops were
required by law to be present at the Church Assembly, and were allowed to
speak to make recommendations, but technically only those bishops who were
elected members had “voice and vote”. (Two of them were elected in 1982,
but in later elections all the bishops refused to run for election.) After
1982, as before, most lay members of the Church Assembly continued to be
elected on a party-political basis, but from 1982 onward this became true
of clergy as well. From
1982 onward, by fits and starts, pressure on the “orthodox opposition”
steadily increased. No longer were there separate ordination services for
opponents of the ordination of women. Olof Herrlin, Bishop of Visby, an
opponent, retired in 1982 and was replaced by a proponent; this left
Bertil Gaertner of Gothenburg the only opponent among the bishops.
Gothenburg was a diocese with a history of strong confessionalist
Lutheranism: Bo Giertz had been a strong representative of that tradition.
Gaertner, an academic New Testament scholar trained at Uppsala, came more
from the “high-church movement” in the Swedish Church, with its stress on
the importance of liturgy and sacraments, but as a winsome personality and
a figure of broad, but orthodox, sympathies, he attracted support from
“traditionalists” of all sort in his diocese and in the State Church in
general. From 1965 to 1969 he had been Professor of the New Testament at
Princeton Theological Seminary, returning to Sweden in the latter year to
become Dean of Gothenburg.
When Bo Giertz retired in 1970-
-- Swedish clergy may retire at age 65 and
must retire at age 67 -- Gaertner’ s name was third on the list
of three candidates. First was Carl Henrik Martling, subsequently
Chaplain-in-Chief to the King of Sweden, and second came the prominent
“orthodox opposition” figure Per-Olof Sjogren (one of whose book, The
Jesus Prayer, has been translated into English). All three were opponents
of the ordination of women, so the government had to choose one of them.
They chose Gaertner, probably supposing that as the least-known, an
academic who had lived in America, his opposition would be the weakest as
well; but in choosing him they had also chosen the youngest of the three:
he was only 45 years old at the time, and so could remain as bishop until
1991. Gaertner, however, stood firm; nor would the Gothenburg diocesan
Chapter administer the requisite ordination examination to female
candidates. Female ordination candidates had therefore to go to the
neighboring diocese of Skara to be ordained and (since Swedish clergy had
to spend five years in their diocese of ordination --
since reduced to one year -- before they can go elsewhere) had to wait for
some time to take up pastoral positions in the Gothenburg diocese.
In
response, a law popularly called the “Lex Gaertner” was passed in 1985,
which required the diocesan Chapter of a diocese of which the bishop would
not ordain women to allow her to be examined elsewhere, and then to invite
the bishop of another diocese to come to ordain her in the cathedral of
their own diocese. As time passed, Gaertner became a “larger than life”
figure: the symbolic figure of the “orthodox opposition”, both in respect
of his spiritual leadership, which transcended the boundaries of his
diocese, and as a figure that attracted the odium of the “liberal
establishment”, among the bishops of the State Church and of Sweden in
general. His “common touch” , and an unexpected ability to acquit himself
well in the media, made him a well-known and popular figure in other
Swedish circles, some of them far removed from the
church.
Gaertner played a leading role in the formation in 1983 ---
in reaction to the abrogation of the “conscience clause” a year earlier
--- of “The Free Synod of the Church of Sweden”, an “orthodox
opposition” group that, while remaining within the Church of Sweden, set
about erecting a “shadow church” within the church, to serve as an
“orthodox alternative” within it and to provide mutual support for their
increasingly marginalized constituency. Yet both as a diocesan bishop and
in retirement he has been most reluctant to envisage or to involve himself
in a split from or within the State Church, although in the earlier years
of his episcopate he was to some extent involved in fruitless approaches
to Rome and to Constantinople seeking concrete discussions of the plight
of the specifically “high-church” orthodox constituency in the Swedish
Church and of the possibility for some sort of arrangement which would
allow for a degree of sacramental intercommunion without a formal break
from their church; and there are well-founded reports, of their nature
without firm confirmation, of at least one approach to a former Roman
Catholic Bishop of Sweden to initiate discussions about a turning to
Catholicism -- an approach received with a singular lack of interest by
the bishop concerned. Still, the fact that there was one diocesan bishop
identified with the “orthodox opposition” -- and a popular one at that
--possibly acted as a restraint upon any attempt to deny ordination to
these traditionalists. But when Gaertner retired in 1991, one of the three
top candidates was a liberal, Lars Eckerdal, a theology professor at Lund
(he came second in the “short list” of three: first came Bengt Holmberg,
also a professor, a “high-church” clergyman deeply involved in the Free
Synod, and third Sven-Arne Svenungsson, a confessionalist Lutheran and
currently head of the Kyrklig Samling, or Church Union, a general umbrella
orgainzation linking the various strands within the “orthodox
opposition”); and of course Eckerdal was appointed -- and within a short
time had his diocese in an uproar over his authorizing clandestine
blessings of same-sex “unions” by some of his clergy. In
retirement (“retirement” of sorts, as apart from his activity as symbolic
leader of the Free Synod and of the “orthodox opposition” in general he
has continued to serve as the bishop overseeing the religious communities
in the Church of Sweden) Gaertner has retained a preeminent influence
within traditionalist circles, restraining tendencies to seek a split from
the Church of Sweden and -- equally importantly insisting that the
theologically rather divergent groups that comprise the “orthodox
opposition” should work closely together and coordinate their efforts -— a
strategy that works well defensively, but tends to frustrate bold
initiatives. In
1993 the Bishops’ Conference, the Central Board (the coordinating
organization for church activities) and the Free Synod tried to work out a
modus vivendi for those opposed to the ordination of women in the State
Church. A document was drafted, formulating areas of agreement and
disagreement between the two sides. When it was published, however, it was
criticized by the supporters of women’s ordination for not having got the
opposition to admit that ordained women were validly ordained and that
Eucharists celebrated by them were valid sacraments -- evidently their
intention was that if the opposition had conceded this point concessions
might be made to their “psychological difficulties” with the ordination of
women. But the opposition refused to concede the point, and so the
discussions collapsed in mutual recriminations. The Bishops’ Conference
then took the bull by the horns and decided that from henceforth no
opponents of the ordination of women would be ordained in the Church of
Sweden. One bishop, Jan-Arvid Hellstrom, Bishop of Vaxjo, a liberal, but a
“liberal-minded” one, stated his continuing intention to ordain whatever
candidates he pleased, regardless of their opinion on the women’s
ordination issue -- other, less courageous, bishops had for some time been
sending to Vaxjo for ordination candidates whom they did not dare
themselves to ordain -- but he was killed in an automobile accident in
January 1994, and after that point all the bishops fell into line. Various
tests were devised to prove the soundness of priests or ordination
candidates on the ordination issue.
Priests whose views were suspect often
were required to administer the chalice at a Eucharist celebrated by a
woman priest; ordination candidates were required to receive communion at
a Eucharist celebrated by a woman priest and to bring a testimonial to the
bishop recording it. In one instance related to me by the Rev’d Dr. Folke
T. Olofsson of Uppsala University, a Pentecostalist minister seeking
ordination in the Church of Sweden in the Gothenburg diocese, but
uncertain about the ordination issue, was told by Bishop Eckerdal that if
he would but once receive communion from a woman priest he could be
ordained, and added that as there was a woman priest working in the same
office he could simply call her in then and there to celebrate the
Eucharist for them both. The proscription of opponents extends beyond a
ban on their ordination, as it has become virtually impossible for
already-ordained opponents of the ordination of women to leave their
current pastorates or other ministerial positions and receive another one,
unless they are willing to take precarious, junior or temporary positions.
A notable instance of the operation of this proscription occurred in 1999
and generated a good deal of public and media attention. The position of
Dean of Stockholm Cathedral fell vacant, and among those who applied for
the position were four opponents of the ordination of women: Goeran
Beijer, Roland Kristensson, Rolf Pettersson and Dag Sandahl. Sandahl and
Beijer have been prominent figures in the Free Synod: Sandahl a
long-serving member of the Church Assembly and something of a “media
personality”, Beijer dismissed in 1998 from his position as Pastor of St.
Jakob Church in downtown Stockholm for his repudiation of the authority of
the Bishop of Stockholm, Henrik Svenungsson, when the latter participated
in the consecration of Sweden’s first woman bishop in October 1997 and for
his subsequent refusal to recognize the “orders” of Svenungsson’ s
successor as Bishop of Stockholm, Caroline Krook, Sweden’s second woman
bishop. In accordance with the 1978 Rules for cooperation... between
proponents and opponents of the ordination of women these candidates
stated their willingness to cooperate with women clergy in all ways, save
in liturgical ministrations. Perhaps these candidacies were intended from
the start at least as much to evoke a response from the ecclesiastical and
civil authorities as in the hope of actually obtaining the position; if
so, it abundantly succeeded, as the Minister for Ecclesiastical Affairs,
Marita Ulvskog (herself an atheist), intervened to effect the removal of
these four candidates’ names from consideration. Some days after the
controversy erupted, a Swedish television station featured a joint
interview, or “moderated discussion”, between Minister Ulvskog and Dag
Sandahl. What was most striking about the program was that Ulvskog not
only attacked Sandahl’s opposition to the ordination of women, but refused
to acknowledge his presence on the program and would address him only in
the third person, as though he were not present --- a favorite device of
totalitarian regimes is the invention of "non-persons", and it would
appear that this technique is alive and well in contemporary Sweden. Less
than a month later, the Bishop of Vaxjo removed Sandahl from his position
as Rural Dean of Kalmar, claiming at first that he had rudely insulted
those opposed to his views, but ultimately admitting that he found it
impossible to work with a clergyman opposed to the ordination of women.
The recent advent of women bishops with Christina Odenberg’s appointment
to the Lund diocese in 1997 and Caroline Krook’s appointment to Stockholm
in 1998 has, of course, increased the tension, as the “orthodox
opposition” can recognize neither the spiritual authority of these women
as bishops nor the validity of the orders of those ordained by them, both
men and women alike. By 1995 both the civil
and ecclesiastical authorities had agreed that the disestablishment of the
church was inevitable, and that it would take effect on January 1, 2000.
This step would prove beneficial to other religious bodies, as the “church
tax” that had previously been collected by the State for the Church of
Sweden from all Swedes who were not members of another religious group or
who had not formally renounced membership in the State Church would now be
collected and distributed to the religious bodies with which individual
taxpayers were affiliated, and these other bodies would obtain a legal
status equivalent to that of the Church of Sweden. For the Swedish Church
itself, however, disestablishment came with self-forged fetters.
Although the Church Assembly was left to work out the details of
disestablishment and to draft the statute which the Parliament was
subsequently to ratify, it was clear on all sides that the disestablished
church had to function in a “democratic” manner and that “dogmatists” had
to be kept away from any possibility of obtaining authority within the
church if the disestablishment were to proceed smoothly. This was the more
pressing, as the issue of homosexual “unions” had arisen in a big way with
the publication in 1994 of the report, “The Church and Homosexuality”,
which in that year had been submitted to the Church Assembly and which
basically took the “liberal line” that while these “unions” were not
“marriages” in the Christian sense, the Church could and should find a way
to “bless” them. The Assembly has never formally discussed the report, but
the Bishops’ Conference acted on its own initiative to provide guidelines
for pastors to deal with the situation. These effectively allowed such
pastors as wished to do so to hold “private ceremonies” to bless the
“unions” of same-sex couples who have already registered “partnership” in
accordance with the provisions of Swedish law, and the bishops also
devised a “liturgy” for that purpose which they subsequently distributed
to the clergy. On all sides this action is viewed as merely an interim
step toward the formal acceptance by the church of such
“unions”. In
the course of the formulating of the details of the government of the
coming disestablished church there were a number of bitter debates and
all-night sessions in the Church Assembly. In one case, the bishops were
initially successful in restoring their ex officio position as voting
members of the Church Assembly, which they had lost in 1982, only to have
the vote reversed during a late-night session; in another, the
archbishop’s taking the initiative to recommend in the name of all the
bishops the selection of members of the post-disestablishment Church
Assembly by indirect elections rather than by direct elections (in direct
elections all church members may vote in elections to parish councils,
diocesan synods and the Church Assembly; in indirect elections -- the
system used in, for example, the Church of England -- lay members enrolled
in particular parish churches vote for parish councils, parish councils
select the lay members of diocesan synods, and the diocesan synod members
select the members of the General Synod) caused such outrage at the
archbishop’s “presumption” as a non-member of the Church Assembly in
trying to influence its deliberations that he was made to apologize and
the Assembly voted to move to a system of direct
elections. Of
most significance for the “orthodox opposition”, perhaps, were the means
devised to exclude the opponents of the ordination of women from
ordination, selection as bishops or promotion of any sort within the ranks
of the clergy. Candidates for ordination in the disestablished church have
to be approved for ordination by a diocesan selection committee, of which
the diocesan bishop is a member. Before approval for ordination,
candidates are obliged to sign a document in which each candidate
indicates his (or her) affirmation of the validity of the ordinations of
all clergy ordained within the Church of Sweden and signifies his (or her)
willingness to cooperate with any other ordained person in all clerical
functions -- which, of course, includes worship and sacraments. For the
first time since the revival in the late 1970s of the “ordained
diaconate”, those seeking ordination to it will also have to commit
themselves to the ordination of women and to full cooperation with female
pastors in their ministry. To deny the validity of some Swedish Church
ordinations (i.e., those of women), or even to express doubts about them,
suffices to bar a candidate from ordination; as the “official line” goes,
such people must be excluded from ordination because their denials
“exclude” those women who have been ordained. A senior clergyman (i.e., a
Kyrkoherde, or Vicar) seeking to move to another equivalent pastoral
position must likewise sign such a statement; an assistant pastor (a
Komminister) need not do so. For the episcopate there is a more elaborate
procedure. For starters, only a member of the clergy can be eligible for
the episcopate. This may seem unobjectionable, but in 1942, when the
Diocese of Stockholm was created, its first bishop was Manfred Bjorkvist,
a laymen active in church affairs, who proved to be a great success and
inspired choice; so the new rule looks like a case of “closed shop”. As to
the mechanics of the choice, there will be an initial selection process
designed to generate a minimum of five candidates. All five candidates --
or, if there are more than five, all those getting at least 5% of the
votes or nomination recommendations —- will be sent a questionnaire to
test their qualifications, such as their age; whether they have been
baptized and ordained, and when; where and for how long they have served
in the church; whether they would be prepared to work equally with all
persons in the ordained ministry; and whether they would be willing to
ordain women. Refusal to provide all the information requested, to reply
in the affirmative to the last two questions; or to respond to the
questionnaire at all will cause a candidate to be disqualified from
further consideration for the episcopate. (If none of the five candidates
get 50% of the votes, a run-off election will be held between the two
highest vote-getters.)
The system has the advantage over the previous ad
hoc sacramental tests that it is a bureaucratic process, and thus avoids
the use of the Eucharist, arguably in a sacreligious fashion (much as the
reception of the Church of England’s eucharist was used as a qualification
for holding public office in England from 1673 to 1829) to separate the
“sheep” from the “goats”, with all the questions about the propriety of
the involvement of the bishops in administering such a test that arise
inevitably from it. It has the additional advantage from the side of the
liberal ascendancy in the church that it admits of no exceptions and is
all but impossible to finesse: a liberal bishop willing to turn a blind
eye to the orthodox views of an otherwise desirable ordinand would find it
impossible to ordain him. Although the Church of Sweden was disestablished as of January
1, 2000, the present bureaucratic structure and its personnel continue in
force for the time being. The first elections for a Church Assembly in the
new circumstances will be held in September 2001, and so it will be some
time yet before it becomes clear whether disestablishment will cause a
falling-off in the proportion of nominal church members who vote in Church
Assembly elections (only somewhat under 2% of church members attend church
weekly, but 10% vote in church elections). A drastic decline in the
numbers of those voting in these elections, or the refusal of a
significant proportion of the clergy to participate in episcopal
elections, could bring the whole structure into disrepute or ridicule. It
might also happen that as the number of laypeople involved in the life of
the church continues to fall, an increasing proportion of those that
remain active will be of a conservative sort, with a growing possibility
that they might demand a revision of the Church Order that excludes them
from any real influence over the church’s life or from leadership
positions within it. Although now effectively barred from ordination, the
“orthodox opposition” within the church shows no real sign of quitting
either the struggle or the Swedish Church. The “Porvoo Agreement” of 1997,
which inaugurated a relationship of “communion” between the Anglican
Churches of the British Isles (the Church of England, the Church of
Ireland, the Episcopal Church of Scotland and the Church in the Province
of Wales) and most of the Scandinavian and Baltic Lutheran Churches (the
Church of Finland, the Church of Norway, the Church of Sweden, the
Estonian Lutheran Church and the Lithuanian Lutheran Church; the Church of
Denmark rejected the agreement and the Latvian Lutheran Church has
deferred action on it ) has fostered international contacts between
conservative Anglicans and the “orthodox opposition~~ in all the
Scandinavian churches, and has offered the prospect, for those who would
desire it, of close links with the assertive and well-entrenched “orthodox
opposition”, mostly of an Anglo-Catholic complexion, within the Church of
England.
When the Porvoo Agreement was being considered for final
ratification by the Church of England’s General Synod in November 1996,
one of the members of the Synod, the Rev’d Geoffrey Kirk, who abstained on
the vote itself, spoke of the way in which opponents of women’s ordination had been excluded from ordination in
Sweden and were on the way to exclusion in Norway, and expressed the hope
that if the agreement did pass, not the least of its benefits would be to
give hope to those suffering from oppression on this score in Sweden and
elsewhere, and he besought the bishops of the Church of England to place
before their Scandinavian partners the example of the Church of England’s
“better way” in dealing with principled opposition to its action in
ordaining women -- a speech which by all accounts was not received with
enthusiasm by the Scandinavian Lutheran bishops present in the Visitors’
Gallery for the vote. “Porvoo” has in effect brought forth a
“counter-PorvOo”, and the links forged thereby seem likely to be strongest
between England and Sweden. The
single greatest difficulty under which the Swedish “orthodox opposition”
labors is the divergent strands of theological thinking of which it is
composed. These include strong confessionalist Lutherans of the “Old
Church” school; Lutheran pietists; charismatic evangelicals; and
high-church “evangelical catholics”. While there is a certain blend, or
overlap, between these groups, the differences are equally clear. In July
1999 I spoke with a Gothenburg “old church” clergyman, Bengt Westholm: he
discoursed at some length to me of a Lutheran missionary organization
financially supported by many Swedish confessionalist Lutherans which aims
to spread Christianity among the unchurched in Moldova and adjacent parts
of Ukraine, and to do so had adapted the traditional Orthodox liturgy to
the demands of Lutheran doctrine, but made it clear that, while opposed to
the overall drift of the Swedish Church leadership, they had no particular
intention of splitting with it. On the other hand, if such a split were to
come, he was very clear that those of his opinion would prefer to link up
with an American body like the strongly-confessionalist Wisconsin
Evangelical Lutheran Synod, or perhaps -- although I thought there was
less enthusiasm here the Lutheran Church/Missouri Synod, and had no
interest whatsoever in cultivating links with conservative Anglican
groups.
I spoke likewise in Gothenburg with another clergyman, Anders
Paradis, who came from an evangelical-charismatic milieu: a priest since
1979, he had been supported in a ministry of healing, deliverance and
exorcism by Bishop Gaertner, but had been viewed with suspicion by Bishop
Eckerdal. His involvement with a demon-possessed young lady, deeply
involved in the occult and with parents hostile to Christianity, led to
her conversion, followed by confession and absolution. Her parents,
however, took the story to the newspapers, which treated it as one in
which a troubled young lady had fallen into the hands of a cult, the
“cult” being the Gothenburg charismatic-evangelical circles of which
Paradis was one of the most visible leaders; the young lady had been
forcibly removed to her parents’ custody and had since then gone back to
her former pursuits. Bishop Eckerdal had summoned Paradis into his
presence and that of the diocesan Chapter and had accused him of bringing
the church into disrepute by his activities, finally suspending him from
the exercise of his priesthood and refusing to give him dismissal letters
to another diocese. While opposed to the ordination of women, Paradis saw
this issue as simply one among many signs of the ongoing apostasy of the
Church of Sweden, and thought that those who upheld Christian orthodoxy
should form a “free church” as quickly as reasonably possible, without
seeking assistance from other churches, but without spurning such as might
be offered.
Another strand within this mosaic is represented by the
“Parish Faculty” in Gothenburg. This is a private foundation, founded in
1993 and supported by several confessionalist Lutheran groups, which grew
out of the Gothenburg Christian Gymnasium (a private school of some 350
students), located in close physical propinquity to the University of
Gothenburg, whose purpose is to offer a strongly Lutheran supplement to
the “non-confessional” and “scientific” approach to religion and theology
offered at the university, for the benefit of possible ordinands and
others wishing to engage in Christian ministry within the ambit of the
Swedish Church in areas such as teaching and evangelism. It is loosely
analogous to Latimer House, Oxford, or Tyndale House, Cambridge ---
private foundations for the promotion and defense of Anglican
evangelicalism and its application to current theological and ecumenical
“problems” --- but with a more “parochial” orientation. It has a fine
theological library (and it subscribes to Touchstone!), and it attracts
from 20 to 30 registered students each year. It devotes a good deal of
effort to train and support the work of travelling preachers, or
“catechists”, to preach in areas and parishes where orthodox clergy are
unable to function or hold office in the church. I had the distinct
impression from Torbjorn Johansson, one of its “faculty members” with whom
I spoke at some length, that the “Parish Faculty” attempts to, if not
avoid, then at least to play down the women’s ordination issue, and that
there is no consensus among its faculty and students on the issue, nor, if
it is an error (as most of them would appear to think, I was told), how
serious an error it is. I learned also, here and elsewhere, of the
singular lack of success that had beset attempts from the 1960s onward to
found Lutheran Confessionalist bodies separate from the State Church:
promising beginnings had been followed by splits and alienation over
issues of doctrine and practice, and these initiatives had in consequence
come to little or nothing. It is
the high-church, or “evangelical catholic”, group that has taken the
widest perspective on the predicament of the Church of Sweden, and that
has also been most actively opposed to the ongoing erosion of Christian
orthodoxy within their church, as witness the activities of the “Free
Synod of the Church of Sweden” since its foundation in 1983. Here, too,
however, there is little agreement about future directions. Bishop
Gaertner has strongly advocated what has been termed the “bowl strategy”,
one which strives for the closest possible links between the various
strands comprising the “orthodox opposition” in Sweden. However, a meeting
of representatives of these various groups in Rome in October 1999
revealed a total lack of agreement about how to respond to the situation.
In response to this, and in the belief that it had proved in practice to
be a failure, Dag Sandahl has advocated the dissolution of the Free Synod
and its replacement by a loose network around Bishop Gaertner to maintain
contacts and, so far as possible, to coordinate activities, but at its
March 2000 meeting the Free Synod voted to continue its existence for the
time being.
My conversations in July 1999 with Goeran Beijer, Bo Brander,
Folke Olofsson and Dag Sandahl, all of them involved in the activities of
the Free Synod, showed little in the way of agreement about the future,
save for a desire to continue their witness. Some of them looked to the
emergence of a “Third Province” or “Free Province” within the Church of
England, with which they might affiliate, and from which they might
receive episcopal oversight, while others looked to the emerging “Nordic
Catholic Church” in Norway under the aegis of the Polish National Catholic
Church as the most promising development (two small congregations of Old
Catholics were founded in the 1960s and 70s in Sweden, and others in
Denmark, by disaffected former Lutheran members of their respective state
churches, and were subsequently admitted to the Old Catholic Union of
Utrecht; one of the Swedish congregations has already affiliated with the
Nordic Catholic Church). Others look for the collapse, or “implosion”, of
the Church of Sweden in the second decade of the new century, as the
falling-away of members traditionally active in its organizational
structures but without any deep Christian commitment leads to an inability
to raise the funds, or even the personnel, to maintain its bloated
bureaucracy, and hope that they will be in a position to salvage something
from the wreckage. I preceived a degree of frustration with Bishop
Gaertner’s hesitations about conducting ordinations of those denied it
solely on account of their opposition to the ordination of women in
defiance of the current church leadership, and alarm about his occasional
hints that he may well --- if he has not done so already --- secretly
consecrate one or more bishops to carry on his work after his departure.
The small stream of converts both clerical and lay to Roman Catholicism,
and an occasional trickle to Orthodoxy, show no sign of drying
up. As
already noted, Bishop Gaertner has continued in “retirement” to serve as
bishop to most of the religious communities within the Church of Sweden.
These include the Ostanback Monastery of some four or five “evangelical
Benedictines” near Uppsala (the other male religious, some two monks “in
the Augustinian tradition” on the island of Gotland under the Bishop of
Visby are not so openly opposed to the current order of things in their
church), and three of the five female religious groups: the Order of the
Holy Spirit (3 nuns), the Franciscan Sisters (5 nuns) and the Sisters of
St. Mary Magdalen (2 nuns); the two groups of “Sisters of the Evangelical
Road of St. Mary”, each one with 10 to 15 sisters, have been described to
me as “wavering” in their stance. The bishop broached the idea of
constituting all the priests affiliated with the Free Synod into a “Third
Order” of clergy -- secular clergy with a common “rule of life” under his
oversight, but the scheme has not been adopted. In recent years “underground churches” -- the term used is koinonias --have begun to emerge within the Church of Sweden, and yet in defiance of its bishops and their authority. The extent of this “defiance” and of their public profile varies between the four organized koinonias. The most defiant is St. Stephen’s Koinonia in Stockholm, whose pastor, Goeran Beijer, was formerly Komminister of St. Jakob’s Church in Stockholm (a komminister is a pastor of a church which has been combined organizationally with other churches, but which retains its own congregational existence; the “head pastor” of the combination is the Vicar) until he was removed, as described above, in 1998. Bishop Gaertner accepted St. Stephen´s invitation to be its bishop, which puts him at odds for the first time in a formal manner with the other Swedish Church bishops. Gaertner has also accepted an invitation to become bishop of the Lund koinonia, which meets at the Laurentiistiftelsen, the St. Laurence Foundation, a student hostel for theology students at Lund University, but independent of the university, which has long been a center of “high-church” activity there. Its emergence as a koinonia was a consequence of the appointment to the see of Lund in 1997 as Sweden’s first female bishop of Christina Odenberg. Its warden, Bo Brander, told me that there are upwards of 40 fully-qualified candidates who have been refused ordination only on account of their stance on the ordination of women, and he hoped that Bishop Gaertner would soon agree to ordain such of them as one or another of these two koinonias would formally present to him for that purpose. The other two koinonias have not yet publicly constituted themselves as such, nor have they besought Bertil Gaertner to serve as their bishop. The first of these is “the Catacombs” in Gothenburg, so called because originally it met in rooms in the basement of the City Hall until Bishop Eckerdal obtained the denial of its further use of the premises. Its growth has been slowed, I was informed, by the presence in Gothenburg of “four good orthodox churches” within the Swedish Church. The other is at the Ansgarstiftelsen, the St. Ansgar Foundation, in Uppsala -- institutionally the equivalent at Uppsala of the Laurentiistiftelsen at Lund, but “more cautious” in its stance and activities. As of mid-1999 the “church establishment” was turning a blind eye to these foundations and to those involved with them. Should Bishop Gaertner break with the Church Order governing the now-disestablished church and ordain clergy for them, it would undoubtedly precipitate disciplinary action against him, and perhaps against the koinonias themselves, whose upshot might, in turn, be a schism within the Church of Sweden or, in the absence of significant internal or external support, simply “a nine days’ wonder”. The choice is a hard one for orthodox Church of Sweden Christians: to stay arid fight in a church body which is structured so as to marginalize them and which, barring a miracle, is past saving, or to depart and go their separate ways, enduring the sadness of what John Henry, Cardinal Newman, referring to his own situation, termed “the parting of friends”. *** Further Developments, 2001-2002This essay was completed in August 2000. Since that time there has been a slow unraveling of the Church Order provided for the now-disestablished Church of Sweden, and a number of traditionalist members of the Church Assembly such as the Rev’d Dr. Dag Sandahl and the Rev’ds Anders Reinholdsson and Yngve Kalin (with all three of whom I have spoken) refused to seek or accept reelection to that body in September 2001, on the grounds that, as there is no longer any direct link between the parochial congregations and the selection of delegates to the Church Assembly, there is nothing left of any “synodical principle” of church government, which in turn means that the new Church Order has, as they contend, no legitimacy. The three matters which appear likely to be “flash points” for conflict in the immediate future are, first, the slow movement towards official church endorsement of the “blessing” of same-sex “partnerships”; second, defiance on the part of congregations and their Parish Councils of the church bureaucracy; and, thirdly, the possibility that the “orthodox opposition”, whether in the shape of those who follow Bishop Gaertner, or simply the koinonias acting on their own initiative, might succeed in effecting a formal break with the Church of Sweden. As to the issue of homosexual practice, while there has as yet been no official change of the stance described above (no formal discussion of the issue, but episcopal “guidelines” for clergy willing to conduct “private ceremonies” for “blessing” such “partnerships”), the occurrence in December 2001 of a very public “private ceremony” in Uppsala Cathedral (the cathedra of Sweden’s archbishop, and so the equivalent of England’s Canterbury Cathedral or York Minster) in which the lesbian “partnership” of Archbishop Hammar’ s own sister, Anna-Karin Hammar, herself a priestess, with the divorced laywoman “feminist theologian” Ninna Edgardh Beckman was “celebrated” (the strongly liberal Hammar, archbishop since 1997, was present, but played no role in the service) has once again drawn media attention to the question and fueled demands (demands with which a number of the bishops are in sympathy) that the Church bring its practice into line with “contemporary Swedish realities”. A committee of the Church Assembly assigned the task of reflecting on the issue from a theological perspective has promised to produce a report in March 2002, and it is thought that, given the stances of its members, the result will likely be a majority report proposing that the Church of Sweden institute a “wedding-like” ceremony to “bless” such “partnerships” and a minority report opposing such a development. There
have, however, been two instances so far of parochial revolt against the
new Church Order, one of which has succeeded and the second ended in an
ambiguous compromise. In late 2000 a parish in the Gothenburg Diocese,
Solberga, called as its pastor a priest opposed to the ordination of
women, Anders Hjalmarsson. This was, of course, illegal under the new
regulations, and the diocesan authorities demanded that the Parish Council
reconsider its choice. However, since it is the Parish Councils, selected
as its members are from candidates affiliated with the various Swedish
political parties who often have no involvement in the life of the
congregation, that enforces the “politically correct” attitudes of the
regime, but which, in the case of Solberga, was dominated by active
members of the congregation, this was unlikely to work in this instance.
The Parish Council, in fact, refused to reconsider, and since the only
other option open to the diocesan authorities was to attempt to dissolve
the parish, they gave up and recognized the congregation’s choice.
And in
the northern Swedish city of Harnosand a major uproar erupted over the
choice of a new cathedral dean, when the diocesan governing board, which
had the right to appoint to the position, turned down without explanation
the candidate who had been proposed by both the bishop and the cathedral
congregation’s Parish Council, appointing instead a woman pastor. The
ordination of women was not itself per se an issue in this controversy,
but when the Diocesan Board refused either to reconsider their decision or
to give a reason for it the Parish Council appointed their original choice
to be their “cathedral vicar” and resolved to pay him the wages for the
deanship, for which they, and not the diocese, were responsible. After
well over a year of controversy, the dispute reached its end, in several
stages: the Diocesan Board’s appointee, Lisa Tegby, withdrew her claim and
received financial compensation to the tune of the equivalent of two
year’s pay; the position was then declared open to applicants, but when
all the applicants withdrew except for the Parish Council’s original
choice, Benny Helgesson, the Diocesan Board refused to accept him and
declared the deanship “temporarily vacant”; and only when Helgesson was
offered and accepted the position of Swedish chaplain in Nice, France did
the Diocesan Board advertise the position for a third time and agree to
include representatives of the Parish Council in the selection process --
a step that finally produced a candidate acceptable to all parties. There
is no doubt that the position of the Diocesan Board was the legally
correct one, but the conflict was a good example and foretaste of the sort
of difficulties likely to arise in the future as a consequence of the
transfer of real authority in the church from the bishops to the Church
Assembly and Diocesan Boards and from the parish pastors to the Parish
Councils. As to the “orthodox opposition”, the Free Synod has experienced a period of internal turmoil over its direction and its very existence. At its November 2000 meeting a proposal that it dissolve itself in consequence of its failure to achieve any of its goals and be replaced by a loose “support structure” centering on Bishop Gaertner was voted down, and in the aftermath of the vote the Rev’d Dr. Dag Sandahl, a member of the Church Assembly and for years one of the most prominent and active members of the Free Synod, quit the group. At and after its March 2001 meeting at Uppsala there was a good deal of strong disagreement between a younger, more assertively Lutheran, cadre of Free Synod members who wished to have the Free Synod take a strong and explicit stand in favor what they held to be the “classical” Lutheran understanding of “Justification by Faith Alone” (and implicitly in opposition to the Roman Catholic/Lutheran “Joint Declaration on Justification”), and the “Catholics” (those espousing a “catholicizing” or “catholic-minded” view of the Swedish Reformation) who wished to retain opposition to the ordination of women and, more generally, to theological liberalism and a “political” model of church government as their raison d’etre. By the end of 2001 this disagreement had not been resolved, and two of the “old guard” members of the Free Synod, the Rev’d Dr. Folke T. Olofsson and the Rev’d Goeran Beijer, separately told me that they had each come to the conclusion that the Synod would remain paralyzed until the “Confessionalists” and the “Catholics” had amicably agreed to disengage and to go their separate ways. The
Free Synod, likewise, appeared to be treading water, if not floundering,
throughout this period over the best way forward to secure outside
assistance if it should come to a break with the “institutional” Church of
Sweden. There seems to me to be a general perception among the Synod
leadership that if it came to a break few lay members would associate
themselves with it, unless it occurred in dramatic circumstances or unless
Bishop Gaertner were to place himself at the head of such a secession,
neither one of which circumstance seemed likely to arise in the immediate
future.
My more “catholic-minded” contacts in the Free Synod appeared to
be of the mind that the “Nordic Catholics" would be far too explicitly
Catholic to attract significant numbers of their colleagues and
coreligionists, and that a much-discussed possible link with one of the
more coherent and Anglo-Catholic (as well as strongly-led) “continuing
Anglican” bodies, the Anglican Province of Christ the King, would be
handicapped in much the same way. In late 2001 the talk was of an “Eastern
Alliance”, by which one or another of the strongly conservative Lutheran
bishops of former parts of the Soviet Union, such as Archbishop Janis
Vanags of Latvia or the Lutheran bishops of Belarus, Ingria (a region in
the vicinity of St. Petersburg, Russia, inhabited by a Lutheran ethnic
group, the Ingrians, related to both the Estonians and the Finns) or
Lithuania would consecrate several leading figures of the Free Synod to
the episcopate -- or, tailing this, that Professor Peter Beyerhaus, a
retired Lutheran Theology Professor of Tuebingen University who, in
retirement, had got himself consecrated to the episcopate by one or more
episcopi vagantes (“wandering bishops”, that is, bishops without sees or
often churches, usually terming themselves “Old Catholics”, but
unrecognized by the “official” Old Catholic Churches of the Union of
Utrecht --concerning whom, see my article “Old Catholics, New Doctrines:
the Fall of the Union of Utrecht” in the January/February 1999 issue of
Touchstone) would himself consecrate bishops for the Free Synod, all in
the hope that by such a course of action the “Lutherans” and the
“Catholics would be able to hold together; but whether all this talk would
lead to action remained as uncertain at the end of 2001 as it had been at
the beginning of the year. Bishop Gaertner himself, at the end of that same year 2001,
faced the threat of canonical difficulties and the loss of his remaining
“official function” as episcopal visitor to the religious communities of
the Church of Sweden, and perhaps even deposition from the ministry of the
Church of Sweden, as a result of his action on December 1st in dedicating
a church building against the will of the Bishop of Karlstad, in whose
diocese the church, located in the hamlet of Stigen in South Dalsland, is
alleged to belong. One has to write “alleged”, because the circumstances
are unique. The church building, a disused Pentecostalist meeting house,
was bought by a group of Church of Sweden conservative confessionalist
Lutherans who wanted to be “of the Church and yet not in the Church”, and
they chose as their pastor Per Anders Grunnan, a man who, unable to be
ordained Sweden because of his opposition to the ordination of women, had
gone to Russia to teach at the Ingrian Lutheran seminary in St. Petersburg
and while there had been ordained by Bishop Kaakauppi of Ingria -- an
ordination which the authorities of the Swedish Church have refused to
recognize.
Save for the official non-recognition of its pastor’s
ordination, this new congregation at Stigen would appear to all intents
and purposes to be a new koinonia, “of” and yet not “in” the Church of
Sweden. When he performed the dedication, Bishop Gaertner insisted that he
had undertaken to act on behalf of people who had been ignored and
neglected by the church structure of which they were a part, and not to
breach the unity of the Church of Sweden (he was quoted in
Goteborgsposten, the main newspaper in western Sweden, a few days after
the dedication service as saying that “The Church of Sweden itself must
bear the consequences of its own acts. When people within the church are
locked out of church buildings, when some of those fit to be ordained are
not ordained by the church, there is nothing strange about people finding
ways to gather on their own”), while the Bishop of Karlstad, Bengt
Wadensjo, accused Gaertner of violating the Church Order by performing an
episcopal function in the Karlstad diocese without his permission, a
permission which he had refused to give when the congregation at Stigen
had requested it of him. Wadensjo and the Karlstad Diocesan Chapter (the
Bishop and the Chapter constitute the diocese as a legal entity) initiated
a process of formal complaint against Gaertner to the Ansvarnaemnden foer
biskopar (the “Inquiry Board for Bishops”), the organ or panel of the
Church of Sweden appointed to receive and investigate complaints against
bishops and to issue rulings on them, later on in December. The “Inquiry
Board” promised to issue a judgement on April 10,2002.
2002 © William J. Tighe |
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