Life Illumined
Beyond our own Boundaries
Today the city of Trondheim had gathered a large number of people to an open meeting regarding its budding plans for the National Jubilee of 2030. I was glad to be asked to contribute. Here is the brief talk I gave:
I have been asked to contribute a few remarks on the city’s plans for 2030 ‘on behalf of the Catholic Church’. The first thing I have to say is this: Catholics in Trondheim, whether they were born here or in Manila, love this place as patriots. We will wholeheartedly support any initiative that fosters community, vitality, and contentment in our city.
I would like to hone in, though, on the city’s explicit will to ‘strengthen our sense of history’ and to ‘develop Trondheim as a destination for pilgrimage’. I do not take it for granted that the city should think in these terms. I think it is great that it does.
Trondheim has venerable institutions. Our cathedral school has, as far as I know, been running without interruption for 873 years. To have such continuity in its midst is a source of stability and security for any city. At a time when so many projects are ephemeral, and hardly anything is built to last, we can take humble pride in our heritage.
The foundation of the cathedral school was connected with the establishment with the archdiocese here in 1152. Until that year Trondheim had been, in canonical terms, submitted to Hamburg-Bremen. When the papal legate, the English cardinal Nicholas Breakspear, the future pope Hadrian IV, visited and established a Norwegian metropolis, Trondheim was no longer a branch of government abroad. It became, in its own name, a European city and a global reference. The metropolitan territory was enormous. In addition to all of Norway it embraced the Faeroes, Shetland, the Orkneys, Greenland, Icelands, and the Isle of Man.
Where did the status of Trondheim came from? Why was our country’s secular and ecclesiastical capital established here?
Why was it not put on Selja or in one of the important trading centres along the west coast?
The decision had to do with St Olav, of course. Therefore the question of international connectedness is relevant to the millennium we are preparing.
Olav himself had, as I pointed out in the city hall last year, an international itinerary. He cannot be understood just in terms of local history. His great example was Charlemagne, no less. His purpose was not only (as we might be tempted to think if we’ve watched Valhalla on Netflix) to gain advantage for himself.
Olav sought to found a new civilisation up here in the North. The Passio Olavi, an account written at about the time Cardinal Breakspear visited, maintains that Olav drove away the cold North wind with ‘a mild breeze from the south’. This is necessarily a somewhat simplified perspective.
Nonetheless, Olav had seen, both in England and France, how society can be constructed differently, built no longer just on might, but on notions of righteousness and equality before the law, a foundation that rendered possible a flourishing of humane features, creativity, and spiritual gain.
He desired such ornaments both for himself and for his nation.
Olav travelled through a range of countries and cultures while he lived. In death he reached further still. His cult spread fast. A little over a year ago I stood in St Olive’s church in York, which was founded less than 25 years after the Battle of Stiklestad in which Olav fell. By that time there was already a church dedicated to him in Novgorod. Both notionally and internationally, then, people considered, while there was still an abundance of witnesses about, that Olav, the warrior, through life’s battle had become a paradigm for a new way of life, that a light of benediction shone through him even beyond death.
This story, too, must be told. After all it was the saint Olav who made Trondheim what it became. It was his cult that attracted pilgrims from all over Europe, and attracts them still. I would like to ask that this international dimension be given suitable weight in the city’s plans for the millennium. It has marked us deeply in the past and might yet mark us today, for good, more perhaps than it already does. Let us use 2030 as an occasion to broaden our perspective and to practise hospitality. That will serve the good of our city long after the fanfares of jubilee have been silenced.
A couple of years after the Battle on Stiklestad, the poet Torarin Lovtunge, who served as spin doctor to King Canute, Olav’s enemy, composed a poem. In it he says that Canute may well have ‘gained a seat in Trondheim’; the kingdom, though, is another’s. For the city belongs to Olav by right. This is where he lived, where he was buried, where he has now been entombed so that ‘each day people can hear the ringing of bells over the king’. Torarin goes on: ‘The crowds kneel to be healed where this holy lord lies; the blind plead for sight; the dumb ask to have speech restored to them.’ Thus an Icelandic-Norwegian political adviser could speak before the Danish king in about 1032 before any kind of propaganda machinery could have managed to make Olav into an ‘alternative reality’ and in the presence of many men who had known him.
Should we lose this aspect out of sight, our millennial celebrations would be the poorer for it.
Trondheim’s two cathedrals.