Out on a Limb in Norway
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.
William J. Tighe: When would you say that you first became marginalized?
Roald Flemestad (RF): The day a lady bishop was appointed, in 1993, I more or less concluded that my days in the Church of Norway were over. But it was necessary, we all thought at that time, to take with us the people we had been working with. We couldn’t just leave the ship because we had been leaders. We were the “sterner” people, but there were other people with us who were less forward but who were also alienated from the Church of Norway. So we couldn’t be satisfied with individual solutions; we had to try to find some common way forward.
Has your evaluation of the church’s situation shifted over the years?
RF: We had an idea that there was a Catholic heritage in the Lutheran tradition—and there is—and our task was to develop it and thereby renew the Church of Norway in this spiritual tradition and heritage. After a while, many of us realized that there was a lack of ecclesiology, a structural fault in the Lutheran tradition, so it was more or less as though we were renewing different aspects, but not the church as a whole.
We could renew the liturgical practices, and in some ways pastoral care, but we could not effectively renew a parish that was part of the state church system. We had done very good pastoral work in parishes, but the minute one of us left, they would get a new priest who would take the parish in a completely different direction. We had to ask ourselves what we could do about this inability to have a lasting impact on the church. For these reasons it seemed that we had to leave.
Many of us concluded that there is in the Lutheran tradition an emphasis on individualism—my faith, my grace, my heart—that takes away the need for an ecclesiology. We simply had to ask ourselves if we had to break out and make a new future, and it was at that point that my thinking was radicalized.
Did you achieve any successes in your efforts?
RF: We had the Free Synod, an association of priests and lay people in the church working together with certain ideals. Part of our agenda was negative: to stop the state from ruling the church and promoting anti-Christian measures. We also had a positive agenda: to promote liturgical renewal and to emphasize the sacramental ministry of the church, such as individual sacramental confession. We wanted to make people conscious of the spiritual heritage of our church. That positive spiritual agenda was, in effect, to recatholicize the Church of Norway, to take up again what had characterized the Church of Norway until the time of the Evangelical revivals in the early nineteenth century.
We didn’t object to these revivals. We could sympathize with much in that movement because it took the Christian life very seriously. On the other hand, it was a very individualistic form of piety, so we had to once again emphasize the commonality of Christian life.
William J. Tighe was Professor of History at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, until his retirement in 2024. He is a member of St. Josaphat Ukrainian Catholic Church in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.He is a senior editor for Touchstone.
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