Catholic diocese raided in Oslo

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newsinenglish.no/2015/02/26/police-raid-catholic-diocese-in-oslo/

Norwegian police raided the offices of the Catholic Church’s diocese in Oslo on Thursday, and charged the diocese, Bishop Bernt Eidsvig and the church’s finance director with serious fraud. The church leaders are suspected of wrongfully claiming as much as NOK 50 million (USD 13 million) in state support by presenting fraudulent membership statistics.

Earlier this week, the county governor (fylkesmann) for Oslo and Akershus reported the diocese to the police for allegedly misrepresenting its church membership. Religious denominations are eligible for state funding in Norway based on their membership statistics.

“The venture Oslo katolske bispedømmet (OKB) is charged with serious fraud, and the sum is for NOK 50 million that has been illegally claimed in state support,” Kristin Rusdal, a prosecutor for the Oslo Police District, told state broadcaster NRK. Rusdal noted that OKB, the Catholic diocese in Oslo, handles the central membership register for the Catholic Church in Norway.
 
If the allegations of fraud are true,this is an example of how some bishops use immigrants to get government funding.
 
All Catholics ARE by default members of the Catholic Church - they don’t have to be registered. That’s a secular rule.
 
anthony022071 said:
newsinenglish.no/2015/02/26/police-raid-catholic-diocese-in-oslo/

Norwegian police raided the offices of the Catholic Church’s diocese in Oslo on Thursday, and charged the diocese, Bishop Bernt Eidsvig and the church’s finance director with serious fraud. The church leaders are suspected of wrongfully claiming as much as NOK 50 million (USD 13 million) in state support by presenting fraudulent membership statistics.

Earlier this week, the county governor (fylkesmann) for Oslo and Akershus reported the diocese to the police for allegedly misrepresenting its church membership. Religious denominations are eligible for state funding in Norway based on their membership statistics.

“The venture Oslo katolske bispedømmet (OKB) is charged with serious fraud, and the sum is for NOK 50 million that has been illegally claimed in state support,” Kristin Rusdal, a prosecutor for the Oslo Police District, told state broadcaster NRK. Rusdal noted that OKB, the Catholic diocese in Oslo, handles the central membership register for the Catholic Church in Norway.

Newspaper Dagbladet has reported that the diocese is accused of registering virtually all immigrants to Norway who come from largely Catholic countries as members of the Catholic Church in Norway, without asking them if they wished to join the church. The church is thus suspected of having received millions of kroner in state support based on invalid membership numbers.

< Dagbladet has reported that Eidsvig was made aware in 2012 that the church was registering immigrants as members of the church without their knowledge. In 2013, the bishop’s council voted to phase out the practice but it nonetheless continued. Eidsvig told Dagbladet earlier this week that there was no intention to manipulate membership numbers and he doesn’t think the diocese is criminally liable.

“The question is whether there was an intention, I think, to register people who are not Catholics,” Eidsvig told Dagbladet. “We have never tried to do that.” He conceded there was “no doubt” the church had registered people who were not Catholics, “but I don’t think you’ll find a clean register in any church community, not that that’s any excuse.”

Dagbladet obtained a copy of an email sent to the county governor by a whistleblower within the church, raising concerns about how church membership was being handled by the diocese leadership. The church has earlier admitted that it registered thousands of immigrants based on their nationality, without the immigrants knowing they’d been listed as members of the diocese.
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Huh? Don’t they know that when you are Catholic is one part of the world you’re still a Catholic in another? That’s why we’re called Catholic - universal. Unless there’s an immigrant from a majority Catholic country who isn’t a Catholic.

Why are they getting funds from the government? Is this a part of the welfare system of Norway? And how come the Catholic Church in Norway gets government funds when they’re not even the established church in Norway at the time? Can a Norwegian help me clarify with this?
 
triumphguy said:
All Catholics ARE by default members of the Catholic Church - they don’t have to be registered. That’s a secular rule.
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Yes, but they wanted the government’s secular money and that means giving an accurate count as to the number of Catholics registered to them. Even the bishop in the article “conceded there was ‘no doubt’ the church had registered people who were not Catholics”.
 
CatholicWhovian said:
Why are they getting funds from the government? Is this a part of the welfare system of Norway? And how come the Catholic Church in Norway gets government funds when they’re not even the established church in Norway at the time? Can a Norwegian help me clarify with this?
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I’m not a Norwegian but a quick search showed several pages which explains that the government of Norway gives monies to religious groups proportional to their registration numbers. The more registrants you have the more money you get.

Here’s an example.
 
Mike_from_NJ said:
I’m not a Norwegian but a quick search showed several pages which explains that the government of Norway gives monies to religious groups proportional to their registration numbers. The more registrants you have the more money you get.

Here’s an example.
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The link does not really explain WHY such a policy (ie, giving money to a religious organization based on membership numbers) is required. Anyone know what purpose the Norwegian government is trying to achieve by doing this?
 
In Norway, everyone who is born there is automatically made a member of the Lutheran Church in Norway, since that is the state religion. Non-Lutheran parents have to “de-register” their children from the state religion at some point. Lutheran pastors are state employees, and Lutheran parishes receive government support. Since non-Lutheran citizens are having their tax kronor going to support the Lutheran church, the government provides money for each officially registered non-Lutheran church, based on membership rolls, to balance things out.
 
Muzhik said:
In Norway, everyone who is born there is automatically made a member of the Lutheran Church in Norway, since that is the state religion. Non-Lutheran parents have to “de-register” their children from the state religion at some point. Lutheran pastors are state employees, and Lutheran parishes receive government support. Since non-Lutheran citizens are having their tax kronor going to support the Lutheran church, the government provides money for each officially registered non-Lutheran church, based on membership rolls, to balance things out.
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Guess there is no seperation of church and state there!
 
To be honest, when I first read the headline I thought the local Muslim groups were acting up.
 
7_Sorrows said:
Guess there is no seperation of church and state there!
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That is an American concept that France is now adapting mainly because of Islam. Much of Europe has some sort of official government support for the religion the state culturally and historically has identified with. I recall a case before the European Court of Human Rights not too long ago about someone suing the Italian government for placing crucifixes in all classrooms in schools. The Court initially went against the government but after so much push-back from several European catholic countries, the Court ended up supporting the Italian government in basically promoting Catholic religious imagery in its schools and public institutions. The main issue is to take care not to impose religion on anybody. However,they have not gone crazy in imagining that any and all cultural religious symbols of the main religious identity of the culture amounts to an imposition. Which is what Americans have decided since the 1960s. No one has to be catholic in Italy or Spain or Poland. That does not mean that the state must completely ignore the main cultural and historical religious identity of the great majority of its population.
 
Muzhik said:
In Norway, everyone who is born there is automatically made a member of the Lutheran Church in Norway, since that is the state religion. Non-Lutheran parents have to “de-register” their children from the state religion at some point. Lutheran pastors are state employees, and Lutheran parishes receive government support. Since non-Lutheran citizens are having their tax kronor going to support the Lutheran church, the government provides money for each officially registered non-Lutheran church, based on membership rolls, to balance things out.
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So the money to non-Lutherans is to balance it out… Makes sense, of a sorts…

But one thing: so any person who is born is automatically made a Lutheran? Even without a baptism? That seems wrong somehow…
 
SammyV09 said:
But one thing: so any person who is born is automatically made a Lutheran? Even without a baptism? That seems wrong somehow…
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It’s a hard idea for Americans to grasp. Think of it as a function of citizenship. The current system grew slowly only of the concept of “the loyal opposition” – that you truly could oppose the monarch (the physical embodiment of your nation) and still be loyal to that monarch.

So you can think of it as being Lutheran in a civic sense, with baptism making you Lutheran in the religious sense.

I strongly recommend The Right to Be Wrong by Kevin Seamus Hasson, which details the role religion has played in American life. The Establishment Clause in the First Amendment (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion…”)is not to totally eradicate religious expression in the public sphere. Rather, it came about because the Constitutional Delegates could not agree on which religion would be the state religion in American.

The delegates were shocked at the idea that the government would not be aligned with one faith or another to provide guidance and temperance to the execution of the law. If the people were not forced to belong to a church, they would soon abandon every notion of service to the Almighty and the churches would soon be empty. This is because every single colony used some form of state-sponsored religion, where the salaries and operating expenses of the churches were provided for by the Colony. (Every colony also had rules about officeholders being limited, excluding Jews, Papists, Mohammedans, and Heretics (Atheists) from holding public office. Some of the colonies kept these rules on the books until the early 20th Century.)

The solution was to keep ANY national religion from being set up. Note that the Constitution did not prevent the STATES from establishing their own state religions, and several new states did. Those institutions fell out of favor and these new state constitutions were changed.
 
The original intent of separation of church and state wasn’t to keep the church from influencing political issues within a particular nation but to keep the government from controlling religious groups to create truly a nation that has religious freedom.

A lot of people use this separation of church and state to mean there can’t be any connection whatsoever ie an established religion. That’s not so the case but rather to simply allow people to practice their religion freely without the government taking away such freedom regardless if the country has an established church or not.

And while Norway no longer has an established religion it is still true that when you are born in Norway you are automatically a member of the Lutheran Church but being a member of the Lutheran Church doesn’t mean that the people still attend. Generally speaking most Norwegians will baptize their infants because that’s the cultural thing to do not necessarily from a place of having a real genuine faith. It really depends on the person. However, if one parent is not Lutheran then the infant of that couple will not be registered as Lutheran.

And I say this as a Norwegian with family in Norway. Although I’m Canadian. But still I know a little bit about the political climate as far as religious practices are concerned.
 
Muzhik said:
It’s a hard idea for Americans to grasp. Think of it as a function of citizenship. The current system grew slowly only of the concept of “the loyal opposition” – that you truly could oppose the monarch (the physical embodiment of your nation) and still be loyal to that monarch.

So you can think of it as being Lutheran in a civic sense, with baptism making you Lutheran in the religious sense.

I strongly recommend The Right to Be Wrong by Kevin Seamus Hasson, which details the role religion has played in American life. The Establishment Clause in the First Amendment (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion…”)is not to totally eradicate religious expression in the public sphere. Rather, it came about because the Constitutional Delegates could not agree on which religion would be the state religion in American.

The delegates were shocked at the idea that the government would not be aligned with one faith or another to provide guidance and temperance to the execution of the law. If the people were not forced to belong to a church, they would soon abandon every notion of service to the Almighty and the churches would soon be empty. This is because every single colony used some form of state-sponsored religion, where the salaries and operating expenses of the churches were provided for by the Colony. (Every colony also had rules about officeholders being limited, excluding Jews, Papists, Mohammedans, and Heretics (Atheists) from holding public office. Some of the colonies kept these rules on the books until the early 20th Century.)

The solution was to keep ANY national religion from being set up. Note that the Constitution did not prevent the STATES from establishing their own state religions, and several new states did. Those institutions fell out of favor and these new state constitutions were changed.
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“So you can think of it as being Lutheran in a civic sense, with baptism making you Lutheran in the religious sense.”

Your comment, plus that of SjMelnychuk, makes sense and sheds light on the matter. Thanks for the clarification.
 
If one wishes to understand how this originally began as to the Lutheran situation:

newadvent.org/cathen/12700b.htm

Scroll down to the section that describes how the Monarchs of the various countries adopted and instituted Lutheranism as the new state religion.
 
I guess state funding can be a double edged sword. On one hand it gives the church money and in theory the resources to expand and spread its message and manage itself on the other hand we have situations like Germany.
 
CatholicWhovian said:
Huh? Don’t they know that when you are Catholic is one part of the world you’re still a Catholic in another? That’s why we’re called Catholic - universal. Unless there’s an immigrant from a majority Catholic country who isn’t a Catholic.

Why are they getting funds from the government? Is this a part of the welfare system of Norway? And how come the Catholic Church in Norway gets government funds when they’re not even the established church in Norway at the time? Can a Norwegian help me clarify with this?
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I think that the problem is that the diocese of Olso was registering immigrants by fraud into the diocese. Being registered to a diocese is a different thing from membership to the universal Church.
 
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