The Catholic Church of Stockholm celebrated the 50th anniversary of its foundation on 12 October, with a mass in the cathedral of St. Erik celebrated by Msgr. Anders Arborelius (the first bishop of Swedish origin since the sixteenth century) and by auxiliary bishop William Kenney. Also present were the king of Sweden Charles XVI and the papal delegate Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, archbishop of Westminster. “It was an historic occasion says a press release put out by the diocese of Stockholm because it’s the first time since 1248 that a delegate of the Pope has visited Sweden”. The diocese of Stockholm was founded by Pius XII in 1953. It then comprised 20,000 faithful and 50 priests, which have now increased respectively to 85,000 and 155. After the Lutheran reformation in the second half of the sixteenth century, it was in fact prohibited to be Catholic in Sweden. A law of 1617 even threatened the death sentence against any Swede who converted others to Catholicism, and there were several cases in which the law was applied. The modern history of Catholicism in Sweden began in 1783, with the establishment of an apostolic Vicariate in Stockholm. Since then the situation began to improve: in 1953 religious freedom was sanctioned and Catholics were registered as “members of a foreign faith”; in 1976 the Catholic Church obtained complete religious freedom.
