Norway Catholics welcome Nobel Prize for writer-convert

Church leaders in Norway have welcomed the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Jon Fosse, a Catholic convert, predicting the honor could raise Catholicism’s profile in the traditionally Protestant country.

“Fosse gives voice, with elegance and beauty, to the mystery of faith — having read him with reverence for years, I think our country is blessed to have a poet of his stature,” said Bishop Erik Varden of Trondheim.

“A Catholic writer is someone who assimilated the grace of belonging to the church in such a way that it’s perfectly innate and natural to their self-expression. In that sense, Fosse is very much a Catholic writer,” he said.

The bishop was reacting to the Nobel Committee’s decision to honor the novelist and playwright, who will receive the 2023 prize in Stockholm Dec. 10.

In an OSV News interview, he said Fosse tended “to avoid the limelight,” but also was known for “speaking openly about his faith, unencumbered by complexes.”

Meanwhile, a prominent priest said the award would highlight the Catholic Church’s rootedness in Norwegian society and culture.

“It provides a wonderful boost for us when Catholics can develop and use their talents to such a level,” Father Pal Bratpak, an Oslo Diocese administrator, told OSV News.

“His literature presents an encounter with greater things, including elements of faith — and while this may not be his conscious objective, it will certainly reach out to people,” he said.

Born in 1959 at Haugesund on Norway’s west coast, Fosse studied at Bergen University, and has published over 30 novels, as well as poetry collections, essays, children’s books and translations, while his theater works, performed worldwide, have made him Norway’s most performed playwright since Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906).

Despite quitting Norway’s official Lutheran Church as a teenager, he served as literary consultant for a new Norwegian Bible translation in 2011, marrying his third wife, Anna, a Catholic from Slovakia, the same year.

Fosse was received into the Catholic Church at St. Dominic’s Monastery, Oslo, in 2012, and his multivolume work, “Septology,” centering on a Catholic convert-painter, was shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize and National Books Critics Award.

In a lengthy November 2022 interview with The New Yorker, Fosse described his style as “slow prose” and “mystical realism,” adding that he had turned to religious faith while struggling with alcoholism and other problems. Fosse stopped drinking while writing “Septology” at the time of his conversion.

“In the world we’re living in, I feel the economic powers are so strong — they run it all. You have some forces on the other side, and the church is one of them,” the writer said.

“The church is the most important institution, as far as I can see, of anti-capitalist theology. You have literature and art as another institution, but they aren’t as strong as the churches.”

In its citation, the Nobel Committee said Fosse’s work gave “voice to the unsayable,” by depicting “feelings of anxiety, insecurity and disorientation” which were often “difficult to capture in words.”

Meanwhile, the Committee’s chairman, Anders Olsson, told Reuters on Oct. 5 that the writer, who holds other literary awards in Scandinavia and abroad, touched on “questions of life and death” and embraced an “appeal of basic humanism.”

Catholics make up a small minority of the 5.47 million inhabitants of Norway, whose three dioceses come under a joint Nordic Bishops Conference with dioceses in Denmark, Finland, Iceland and Sweden.

In 2015, the Oslo Diocese was raided by police after media claims it had obtained extra state subsidies by inflating membership lists.

However, church officials say numbers have tripled in the last two decades, largely thanks to migrants and refugees from Catholic countries.

Among reactions to the Nobel announcement, Bishop Bernt Eidsvig of Oslo said in a statement the honoring of Fosse had come as “the best news” for Norway’s Catholics, adding that he was pleased the writer, while not “seeing himself as an apologist,” was “bearing witness to his faith.”

Meanwhile, another Catholic convert, historian Nils Heyerdahl, president of the Norwegian Academy of Language and Literature, said Fosse had been “well established” as a writer before becoming a Catholic, but had always included a “religious dimension” in his work – “not in the form of intrusive opinions, but as a mysterious presence in the language.”

Fosse is the fourth Norwegian writer to win the Nobel Literature Prize, currently worth 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million), after Bjornstjerne Borjnson in 1903, Knut Hamsun in 1920 and the novelist and translator Sigrid Undset, who won the award in 1928 after also converting to Catholicism and becoming a lay Dominican.

In his OSV News interview, Father Bratpak said it was “interesting and remarkable” that two of the four Norwegian laureates were Catholics, who had “won popular appreciation” for “communicating their faith through literature.”

However, he added that other ordinary Norwegians had embraced the Catholic faith while “passing under the radar,” and said he hoped Fosse’s high profile would not “reinforce a mistaken stereotype” that most converts were “academics and intellectuals.”

However, Bishop Varden said Fosse’s prominence as a Catholic would give church members “special reason to rejoice.”

“It may encourage more Catholics to read great literature — inducing some them to make creative contributions to the public forum in ways which make Christian hope seem apparent and credible,” said the British-trained bishop, also a convert, whose northern Trondheim dioceses has five parishes and four monastic houses.

“We must wait and see if this award has an evangelical impact and brings more people to the church. But to read Fosse is to grow in self-knowledge and learn to observe the lives of others with an intelligent tenderness.”

The Nobel Prizes, founded in 1895 by the Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel (1833-1896), are awarded annually to people judged to have “conferred the greatest benefit to humankind” in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace.

Past Nobel literature laureates include the German Thomas Mann and French Albert Camus, as well as Colombia’s Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the American John Steinbeck, Britain’s wartime premier Winston Churchill and singer-songwriter Bob Dylan.

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