A monastery in the fjord

Implanting a Benedictine monastery in the “fjord of the whales”: that’s the dream of Mgr. Pierre Bürcher, former auxiliary bishop of Lausanne, Geneva and Fribourg and in charge of the Catholic community of Iceland since December 2007. In a report written for the Kipa-Apic press agency, with the title “A Swiss bishop on the edge of the Arctic circle”, the agency’s director Jacques Berset draws a portrait in the round of the Icelandic Catholic community. It’s small (some 10,000 faithful, for the most part foreigners, scattered over a territory of some 100,000 square kilometres), but lively, despite being poor in indigenous vocations. Rediscovering Christian roots. Catholicism was peacefully introduced into the island around the year 1000. Prior to the Reformation, Iceland could boast of some ten Augustinian and Benedictine monasteries: they were centres of culture, explains Berset “in which the Latin alphabet had replaced the ancient runic script, but which were abolished with the Lutheran Reform imposed on the Icelandic population by the King of Denmark Christian III in the sixteenth century”. In Bürcher’s view, the establishment of a Benedictine monastery would represent “a vital contribution to the current situation of Iceland” and could play a cultural role of major importance”. “The country – he says – must rediscover its authentic values and its Christian roots. Following the economic boom of recent years, as a result of which less than 10% of the population lived below the poverty threshold, these values have been somewhat forgotten. That happened before the credit crunch, the collapse of Icelandic banks and the ensuing deep economic and social crisis”. Now, continues the bishop, “people find themselves having to face vital questions. Iceland needs to have the chance of choosing a living Christianity, as it did in the year 1000”. An alternative to consumerism. Bishop Bürcher and his fellow priests have taken the first steps to obtain a site for such a monastery: “a start could be made with little, for example with three monks”, says the bishop, who has already made contacts with Swiss and German monasteries. “Evangelization must be progressive – he says – and take account of the island’s particular conditions”. Iceland “is at a turning point: people are searching for new values and the Church can offer alternatives to the consumerism that has enslaved so many”. Unfortunately there’s a lack of local vocations to the priesthood: apart from one seminarian from the eastern part of the island, now a student of theology in Rome, two other young men are showing an interest in a vocation, “but for one of them we still need to wait a year”, says Mgr. Bürcher. Of the six bishops who have succeeded each other since the reintroduction of the Catholic Church in the second half of the nineteenth century, only one was a native of the island. He was Bishop Jóhannes Gunnarsson, vicar apostolic from 1942 to 1967, prior to the foundation of the diocese of Reykjavik in 1968 which marked in some way the end of a long and laborious process of rebirth, during which Catholicism was preached in Danish – language of the colonizers – and hence, at least up till the end of the nineteenth century, difficult for the island’s indigenous population to grasp. “Local vocations” needed. According to Bishop Bürcher the priority is to “form local vocations so as no longer to be a Church of foreigners”. In the whole of the diocese today, explains Berset, there are 36 women religious. The most recent and youngest community is the Institute of the Handmaids of the Lord and of the Virgin of Matara, a congregation of Argentinean origin, with four nuns: three of them Argentines and the fourth Brazilian. The community is based at Hafnarfjördur, next to the Carmel that now houses a community of eleven Polish sisters, present in the island for 25 years though without having had any indigenous vocations. The six Sisters of Charity of Mother Teresa at Reykjavik also include four Polish sisters, one African and one Philippine. The situation of priests is rather similar. There are 17 in all, only one of whom, Abbot Hjalti Thorkelsson, is of Icelandic origin. The priests and lay personnel in service in the five parishes of the diocese are under the charge of the bishop who emphasizes the difficulties linked to language and to the large distances between the separate communities (the faithful are scattered over a territory two and a half times the size of Switzerland, with roads that are not always asphalted and often blocked by snowstorms during the winter). The Catholic communities in Iceland mainly consist of Poles, followed by Philippinos, Lithuanians and Latin-Americans. Icelanders form a tiny minority. “They are – explains Bishop Bürcher – very indulgent to the foreigners who try to speak their language, but at the same time very demanding, because they know the importance it has had for their national history. It’s a people that has many poets, a people whom the long winters encourage to read and write. Thanks to the country’s isolation, the language has remained very pure”. In the cathedral of Christ the King of Landakot at Reykjavik, the liturgy is celebrated in various languages: in Icelandic on Saturday evening; in Icelandic and Latin on Sunday morning; in Polish in the afternoon, while English is the language of the vespertime mass. Masses are also celebrated in French, Italian, Spanish and Lithuanian.