Example
Only in Hammerfest have I had the experience of seeing wild reindeer from an airport carpark. The Catholic parish in the town is the world’s northernmost. The climate is challenging; though much depends on your point of view. The locals say: ‘We’ve nine and a half months of winter, but apart from that it’s non-stop summer!’ The first Catholic Church was dedicated here in 1878, part of the extraordinary North-Pole Mission headed by Baron Étienne Djunkowski. What were its principles? They were various; but one can get a sense of which were most effective. The other day I met a nonagenarian, wonderfully youthful parishioner who is a fourth-generation Hammerfest Catholic. What, I asked, had caused her great-grandmother to convert at a time when Catholicism was held in suspicion and snowball fights erupted between Catholics and Laestadians? Her answer was clear: The example of the Sisters of St Elisabeth, who made this patch of land their own and loved it, who poured themselves out to help people during a time of famine while nurturing a deep life of prayer, maintaining the church as a place of beauty in a setting of harshness. The lesson is perennial.
