Female Counter-Culture and Catholic Mission: The Sister of Saint Joseph in Denmark and Sweden

This article is dealing with the work of a Catholic St Joseph Sisters in the Nordic countries, particularly in Denmark and Sweden, from the sisters’ arrival in 1856 to the 1920:ies. These Catholic sisters belonged to a French congregation called La Congregation des Sœurs de Saint-Joseph de Chambéry, which was founded at the beginning of the nineteenth century and whose motherhouse was in Chambéry in Savoy. The Chambéry congregation was the second female religious congregation to be established in the Nordic countries since the Reformation and the most successful. At the beginning of the 20th century, there were around 800 St Joseph Sisters living in communities spread throughout the Nordic countries. The congregation developed a broad range of activities in the fields of health care and school education, which were all part of the Catholic Church’s effort to bring the Nordic people back to the Catholic Church. The majority of the sisters came from Catholic countries, mainly from France and Germany. The work of the St Joseph Sisters, as well as the reactions they encountered, provide an instructive example of the differences and antagonism that existed between “Catholic” and Protestant-influenced “Nordic” values and outlook. In my presentation, I will take into consideration the counter-cultural role of the then Catholicism in modern society. From a Nordic point of view, Catholicism appeared as a counter-culture in a double sense. It not only represented an alternative worldview but also an unfamiliar belief system that many regarded as a threat to their Protestant-influenced national culture. Catholic religious orders were considered as particularly dangerous, not least female ones. They represented an alien form of women’s culture in a society, where the Lutheran doctrine of vocation with its stress on women’s maternal and domestic duties was still an indispensable part of the prevailing social norm system