# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1860_S180
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

180 Something More about the Church of Norway.

neously called "Tremsö"). The head of this mission was the prefect Dr. Etienne, formerly a contributor to the "Univers," to which he later also supplied splendid mission reports as contributions; the rest, too, were foreigners, and only one of them had command of the Danish language. First they bought the sizable estate "Alten" in the rural district, drew up a grand plan for erecting a higher school, and held showy worship services; but the one got no pupils, and the other was, at the start, attended only by the curious. Yet they did not lose heart on that account; recently they have bought, in the town of Tromsö, a large plot and buildings for 5000 speciedaler (about $5500), and intend there to start a school again, to set up a printing house, and to build a church. Alten, therefore, has not been given up either, but the main point now seems bound to become Tromsö, and there were even nine persons there who had already been received back again into the bosom of the sole-saving church. But the congregations at both places consist mostly of disreputable persons, released convicts who do not appear to have been reformed in the penitentiary; and as means of conversion, temporal goods, food, and clothing are said also to be used in the long, hard winter season — indeed it is even commonly said that a man is "lent" 15 and a woman 10 speciedaler if they become Catholics. Other artifices, too, are employed by them: they sell, for instance, books and tracts whose titles sound quite nice and unsuspicious, and which are therefore bought by simple farmers in good faith as genuinely Christian — but the content is genuinely papist. In Bergen, the second city of Norway, they publish a "Catholic Intelligence-Sheet," which has already expressed its delight at having discovered, in Grundtvigianism, a "bridge" over the deep gulf between Protestantism and Catholicism. That the publisher is not entirely wrong in this cannot be denied; for Grundtvigianism sets the church's confession in the apostolic symbol as the supreme norm of faith, and calls the spoken word of the church the living word, as opposed to the dead written one; but to most adherents of this direction this awareness is quite foreign, and they have therefore also protested most decidedly against that charge, or that praise. Moreover, the Jesuits of "ultima Thule" have not forgotten the capital either, but fortunately they too have there become manifest. One of their preachers had brought the directress of a children's asylum over to conversion, but had ordered her to keep the matter secret; so he then also left her name out of the register that he must deliver to the authorities every year. But the matter was discovered, and he was sentenced to a fine, which, however, in the "Univers," procured him the martyr's crown, and Norway the most shameless abuses. On the whole, people do not fear the Catholics very much, though one does not conceal from oneself the danger that lies in the fact that the Roman church never abandons a place once she has established herself in it, that she leaves no lure unused, and finally, too,