Remains of the Swedes
An Interview with Bishop Göran Beijer of the Mission Province of the Church of Sweden
William J. Tighe (WT): Could you give our readers a brief outline of your life and career?
Göran Beijer (GB): I was born in 1940. My father was a priest, and later a rural dean, on the island of Götland in the middle of the Baltic Sea. I studied theology at the University of Uppsala, and was ordained a priest on Götland, in Visby Cathedral, in 1967, by one of the last, actually the next-to-last, orthodox bishops in the Church of Sweden, Dr. Olof Herrlin.
I worked as a priest in Visby for seven years, and then I was asked to join the staff of the Church of Sweden Mission to be its Information Secretary, which I was until 1982. Then I spent a year in Beirut, sent off by the Church of Sweden Mission to study the Eastern Churches. I did some work on the staff of the Middle Eastern Council of Churches, with which the Church of Sweden began to have contacts in the 1970s.
Then I came to Stockholm as a chaplain at St. Jacob Church, a downtown church with a long Catholic tradition in the Church of Sweden. At that time it was still a separate parish, but later it was merged into the Stockholm Cathedral parish, but I stayed on as chaplain responsible for those of the parish who worshipped at St. Jacob’s.
In 1997 the first woman was elected as a bishop in the Church of Sweden, Christina Odebergh of Lund diocese, and I and other people at St. Jacob’s refused to accept the spiritual oversight of our own bishop, Henrik Svenungsson, any longer, because he had participated in her consecration. As a result, I was removed from my position as chaplain, but they gave me other things to do, as they did not yet dare to fire me. So I worked on at those tasks until I retired at the end of 2005.
I have been active all my life as a priest in the Church Union, a major Catholic society within the Church of Sweden, and within the Free Synod, since that organization was set up in 1983 in order to safeguard a place for the orthodox in the Church of Sweden. But when that failed, I saw no reason to remain within the Church of Sweden, and devoted myself to the cause of building that “free diocese” that eventually became the Mission Province. Many of my like-minded friends held back, thinking that they would give the Church of Sweden one more chance, but I had come to the conclusion that there was no possibility for that, and so I went for the Mission Province.
WT: What is the Mission Province of the Church of Sweden, its nature, its purpose, its origin?
GB: Well, the Mission Province in Sweden was set up when it was clear that ordination candidates who couldn’t fully cooperate with women priests were no longer going to be ordained. The Church of Sweden’s bishops decided that in 1993, and from that time on, we started to discuss what could be done, and it ended up with some of the groups in the Church of Sweden opposing the ordination of women to the priesthood—some of them, but not all of them—deciding to set up a “mission province” with a hierarchy, so that those candidates could be ordained, and those congregations of a like mind could have priests in the future whom they could trust; and that there would continue to be a ministry that would maintain the genuine tradition of the Church of Sweden.
WT: Could you say a little about the present size of the Mission Province?
GB: The Mission Province is still very small. Congregations in the Church of Sweden are geographical parishes. People belong to the geographical parish of the area in which they live, and are not allowed to belong to any other parish. Approximately 80 percent of the Swedish population belong to the Church of Sweden as “formal members,” and as these “formal members” have congregational voting rights even if they seldom come to church, we could not reasonably expect that any congregations would vote to affiliate with the Mission Province. So we had to set up free congregations, which we call “koinonias.”
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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