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Why are the priests really attacking? It does not pay for performance in any case. If we compare the number of parishioners with an increasing number of priests, they would hardly have had butter on their bread.
For the first time, Norwegian priests went on strike. Yes, the strikers themselves take it so badly that they claim it is for the first time in world history that the priests are on strike.
If so, there may be a good reason for it. And outsiders may wonder who they are really attacking against. Could it be God?
No, only Catholics are arguing with God. Also, priests are not ordained by God today, it was a long time ago. Now they are employee in the usual way, and the other party in the wage fight is something as prosaic as the Church Employers Organization (KA), formerly the Norwegian state.
And here are buried much of the will to strike and the hatchet.
Well, it was good to be released and independent of the state. But the state salary conditions the priests would like to stay. In particular, the free housing scheme in state vicars. Now it has fallen, without KA wanting to compensate correspondingly in the form of higher wages.
READ ALSO: Half a million say they want to start Christmas at church.
And there will be noise, which is easy to understand. Few people will lose their salary or lose an asset, I think the Norwegians understand that. It is worse with the argument:
– In not many years I will retire and I fear that we will not be able to recruit priests to take up the position, says the deputy director of the Trade Union Theologians, Heinke Foertsch, to the specialized magazine Fagforbundet.
And not only that:
– In four years, the situation is such that there will be a shortage of 200 priests nationwide, says Foertsch, who also knows how to remember everyone’s Christmas traditions. According to her, the lack of priests could lead to more local churches having to close.
– This means that people, for example, do not want to have a Christmas service in their church, but have to travel far, says Foertsch, who is daily seniorprest at Groruddalen in Oslo.
Note the threat of an alleged priest shortage. Because it’s kinda weird all the time no It is such that the number of priests in the Church of Norway has decreased in recent years.
On the contrary: even though there are fewer and fewer parishioners (see below), the church has created more and more positions and hired more and more priests. Take, for example, long-term development here (figures from the Ministry of Children and Family Affairs and the Church Employers Organization):
1990: 1000 priestly positions in the Church of Norway
2000: 1,200 priest positions in the Church of Norway
2019: 1,300 priest positions in the Church of Norway
What they call the priest shortage does not stem from the fact that there will be fewer priests, but on the contrary, that they will not be able to fill the newly announced positions quickly enough.
Only the last two years, from 2017 to 2019, was created 100 new pastoral houses in Norway, according to KA figures. This comes at the same time as a fairly marked decline in church membership:
In 15 years, from 2005 to today, the membership of the Norwegian National Church has fallen from almost 4 million to 3.5 million, figures from Statistics Norway show. While the number of priests to serve them, that is, has increased.
And the mismatch increases if it includes everyone others employees, the gradually quite extensive support apparatus around the church offices:
We can, for example, go to the church where I was confirmed in the last century, to the Ålesund parish in the center of the old city, which at that time had a priest and a part-time servant. The same happened with the neighbor, the parish of Volsdalen.
Now the two congregations have merged, and can you guess how many are working there now?
The number is nine (9). In addition to three priests, they have a deacon, a parish educator, two cantors, and a teacher leader. There are so many that they must also have a CEO.
Read more comments from Erik Stephansen
However, Sunnmørsposten published an article in August in which the parish priest Arnt Sigurd Sollie apologized for the situation, under the title You cannot take people to churches.
Here he admits that the number of parishioners is half reduced the past 15 years, from a total of 20,000 worship participants in 2006, to just 10,000 in 2019.
On a typical Sunday at Ålesund church, between 40 and 140 parishioners show up, the pastor said. In Volsdalen it varies from 5 to 50. Five single people, that is, in a church with space for more than 500 people. Almost only older, of course. Families with children do not exist. Neither do the young.
But now we will not be unfair. Certainly there are congregations that are more successful than this. And I’m not saying that priests don’t do their job. Or that they earn too well. They certainly don’t.
But obviously there is something that they do not achieve. Seen from the outside, the Church of Norway looks more and more like an empty shell with no content, except as an emcee on very special occasions – reading Christmas Eve. Perhaps a higher salary for priests will help rectify this. Or maybe not.
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