Out on a Limb in Norway

[Siddhartha]

An Interview with Norwegian Dissident Roald Flemestad

The Reverend Dr. Roald Flemestad is a senior lecturer on dogmatic theology at Det Norske Diakonhjem (a church-related educational institute that educates “diaconal workers” in medicine and theology) in Oslo, and a former pastor in the (Lutheran) Church of Norway. He is now a priest in the newly formed Nordic Catholic Church, which has eleven clergy, ten of whom are former priests of the Church of Norway. Touchstone correspondent William J. Tighe conducted this interview in August 2000 in Oslo, Norway.
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To put it bluntly, why the Nordic Catholic Church? Why not Rome? Why not Orthodoxy?

RF: We had been united as a group, and there was a lot of internal loyalty to the group. Those of us who had leadership responsibilities did not want to leave the people that we had put in such a difficult position. So we tried to find a collective solution. Orthodoxy would probably have accepted us in the end, after a transitional period, as a Western rite parish or parishes.

The Roman Catholic Church never gave any indication of an option other than individual conversions. For our leadership, Rome also was more difficult in the sense that many people had difficulties with various Roman Catholic dogmas, especially the Marian dogmas. As to Orthodoxy, it was felt to be culturally impossible not to follow a Western liturgical calendar.

Even though we were not looking for the lowest common denominator, we had to take into consideration that not all our people were moving at the same speed, and some probably were not going to move either to Constantinople or to Rome. Therefore, those of us who had responsibility wanted to find some sort of structure that could take us as a flock. So we made contact with the PNCC in 1996. They were very generous to us and proposed a period of convergence into the new system.

Of course, it has been somewhat difficult theologically: Many of us, because of our background, are rather Augustinian in our theological thinking, but we have been very influenced by Orthodoxy in our liturgical style and also, perhaps, in our theological thinking. So we are living with a certain theological tension, perhaps a creative tension, in the sense that we are trying to unite a Western Augustinian theology and ethos with elements from the Orthodox Church. Perhaps that means, unfortunately, that we are too Augustinian to become Orthodox and too Orthodox in some of our approaches to become Roman.