What was it like growing up in a place with so few Catholics? Was it hard to pursue a vocation and live the faith? Here are the details.
Growing up in a rural part of Norway, Deacon Mathias Ledum and his family were just about the only Catholics in town.
“It was for sure a bit of a challenge growing up Catholic in my little hometown, as it was literally just me, my sister, my mother, my aunts and cousins, and another Filipino-Norwegian family who were Catholic,” he recalled in an interview with Aleteia.
Ledum’s vocation story became international news when he became the first deacon to hail from the home parish of Nobel winner and Catholic convert Sigrid Undset in about 500 years.
His story made us curious: What was it like growing up in a place with so few other Catholics? Was it hard to pursue his vocation and live his faith in a country where Catholics are only 3% of the population? Here’s what Ledum told us.
Not easy, but good priests helped
“It was not always easy,” he readily conceded. “I had a hard time trying to explain to my friends why I went to church on Sundays, why I got sad when I unintentionally failed to observe the fast during Lent and why I was not going to be confirmed in the Lutheran church like my classmates.”
When he began volunteering as an altar server, he was horrified at the thought of someone finding out! Fortunately, his friends didn’t care: “I was lucky that I mostly was respected for this, and people did not seem to treat me differently.”
Faith challenges
But things got harder in high school, when people started to challenge Church doctrines and called into question some Catholic practices.
“For a moment it ‘rocked the boat’ a bit for my faith too,” he said. “My childhood faith was not entirely ready for that.”
But fortunately, these encounters just became an opportunity for him to grow closer to a local priest and benefit from his example:
Luckily, I had a young, newly ordained priest who was in charge of my confirmation catechesis at the moment, and he took all of my questions and doubts seriously, answered them generously, and gave me the tools to explore and unpack the great treasure chest of our faith! I was fortunate to have some really great newly ordained priests arrive at our parish, who opened up this whole new world for me.
Three of the priests who were in charge of Ledum's parish during his youth and young adulthood, to whom he owes a lot to for being such a huge inspiration for he.
Courtesy of Deacon Mathias Ledum
At that point, it was not even on his radar that he might ever become a priest himself. Yet these priests inspired him in his faith: “Their way of living their vocation inspired me to live a joyful life in service of God and my neighbor.”
Realizing he was part of something universal
In high school, Ledum became an active participant in the Norwegian Youth Ministry, and this became a turning point: “I got to experience a young and lively Church, something that was not always so evident in my home parish after the other young people moved away for university studies.”
A powerful and life-changing moment came during the World Youth Day in Madrid in 2011:
When around 2 million other Catholics, a mixture of people from different countries, cultures and traditions, were led in prayer by the successor of Peter and knelt down in complete silence before the Blessed Sacrament, I came to understand that I was part of something really huge, namely the universal and apostolic Catholic Church. That gave me the right perspective to endure living in a place with few Catholics.
A picture from World Youth Day in Madrid together with the youth of the parish.
Courtesy of Deacon Mathias Ledum
He will be the first priest in 500 years
When we asked Ledum, “What will it feel like to be the first priest to come from Lillehammer in more than 100 years?” He quickly corrected that number:
It’s not just 100 years, but actually ever since the reformation in 1537! So, my first thought is, “Don’t mess it up now. It would be terrible if people had to wait for this long only to have a lousy priest.”
Jokes aside, he feels honored to be the first vocation from the city of Lillehammer and the rest of the Gudbrandsdal valley: “Not because there is anything extraordinary about me, but because it is a strong testimony that prayer really works, and that God answers them in His time and through His Divine providence! Faith is not dead here.”
A deeply-rooted history
He recalled the earliest Catholic history of Norway and explained how this history inspires his own efforts in ministry today:
Even St. Olav, our patron saint, struggled to evangelize this area, but finally succeeded in his encounter with the local pagan chieftain Dale-Gudbrand back in 1021. They had a similar encounter to that of Elijah and the prophets of Baal, trying to see whose God was the strongest one. Dale-Gudbrand and his men brought a huge statue of Thor and they laughed at St. Olav and his men when they seemingly came empty handed and asked them where their God was.
As they met in the early hours of the day, St. Olav timed it perfectly so that the end of his sermon about Jesus coincided with the sunrise, and pointed towards East and said, “There is our God coming with great light!” As the pagan men were blinded by the sunlight, one of St. Olav’s men grabbed a club and smashed the statue of Thor to pieces, and the story tells that mice and serpents crawled out of it, and with that, as well as hearing the Good News and seeing their former idol be destroyed, the local chieftain Dale-Gudbrand and his men finally renounced their paganism and were baptized.
A depiction of the scene where St. Olav and his men meet the local pagan chieftain.
Courtesy of Deacon Mathias Ledum
Drawing inspiration from Undset
He shared how he finds inspiration not only in St. Olav, but also in Nobel-winning writer Sigrid Undset, who made her home in his same small town and was part of the same parish:
Coming from this same area and inspired by my patron St. Olav, whom Sigrid Undset also held so dearly, I really want to dedicate my priestly ministry to letting the message of salvation pierce through the deafness towards Jesus that secular society has caused. Through God’s grace, I want to share the kerygma, so that the light of Jesus Christ can itself be the thing that shatters to pieces any misconceptions about the faith, any beliefs in false idols, hollow ideologies and superficial pleasures, and gives them the salutary meaning to their lives.
In the same way as Undset did, I want to re-introduce the truth, beauty and goodness of the Catholic faith to my fellow countrymen, hopefully through my testimony of faith and example, my writing, my preaching, my social media presence and even my skateboarding in a cassock (something Undset definitely didn’t imagine the future would hold!).
Looking ahead with hope
Something that stood out in interviewing Ledum is his contagious joy and enthusiasm, even as he faces a big task ahead in his ministry.
We asked, “What are some things you are looking forward to doing in your ministry as a Catholic priest in Norway?” He shared his hope for a great renewal of faith in Norway and all of Scandinavia:
To serve a wholly unique Church that is so Catholic in the sense of universal! Over 300 years after the Reformation, the Catholic Church was officially re-established in Norway in 1845, and in 1856, the first Catholic Cathedral after the Reformation was built in Oslo. They must have had the same sort of prophetic foresight as Undset, because instead of building a Cathedral for the 40 persons who made up the Catholic population in Oslo at that time, they built one for 300!
Little did they know that 150 years later, the Catholic population of the country would have risen to around 150,000 to 200,000 Catholics. Today this Cathedral parish has 16 different Masses every weekend celebrated either in Norwegian, English, Polish, Spanish, French, Tagalog and Croatian, and often also in Vietnamese, Tamil, Arabic, Cebuano etc. A former parish priest described having parishioners from 154 different countries coming to Mass in the same parish like “celebrating Pentecost every Sunday!”
My hope is that this vibrant community can stand as a witness of hope in a country that materially has everything, but still struggles with a depressed and unsatisfied population. I hope people become aware of what our countries lost during the Protestant Reformation and realize that we have a huge Catholic legacy, and that preaching the Good News will warm the hearts of the people living in an individualistic society growing ever colder. I desire that my ministry becomes a contribution to #MakeScandinaviaCatholicAgain!
There is definitely a spiritual awakening happening in the Nordic countries. There are more and more converts every year, and we see an ever-growing community of young adults reverting to the faith they grew up with but “lost” on the way. It is evident that people are seeking something more, something greater than themselves, because wealth, fame and pleasure has failed to make them find meaning and peace in their life.
I hope as a priest I can introduce or reintroduce Jesus to them, and thus help them readdress this longing for what will ultimately help their hearts find rest.
