The church as mosaic: Catholicity in a pluralist context

Abstract

In 1781, at the beginning of the second confessional age in Europe, the Roman Catholic Church was re-established in Sweden. In 1953, at the end of that age, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Stockholm was founded, partly as a result of the first law on religious freedom in Sweden and following a period when the Catholic Church had been organised as a counter culture in a society marked by the hegemony of the Lutheran Church of Sweden. In 2000 the State Church system was finally abolished, and other religious bodies were officially recognised by the State. From World War II the Catholic Church had grown through immigration and become a multicultural church with more than 100 nationalities represented. In this article, the multicultural dimension of its Stockholm diocese is scrutinised through the prism of the new ‘Parish Regulations’ (2004) and the question asked, ‘How can immigration, inculturation, multiculturalism express catholicity in a diaspora church, existing in a deeply secularised, former Lutheran, context?’