Iceland’s churches are filling up fast
In 1994, Iceland’s Catholics made up just one per cent of the population, wrote Lea Müller at the Reykjavík Grapevine. But today, thanks partly to Polish immigration, that figure has risen to four per cent. The church that has seen the biggest rise in attendance is Landakotskirkja in Reykjavík: it “is sometimes hardly able to accommodate the large numbers of people who flock there”.
Fr Jakob Rolland, the priest at Landakotskirkja, is encouraging Icelandic Mass-goers to register, as the Church receives government funding per head. He also hopes that the government will take more notice of Catholics’ political values on matters including abortion and marriage. “It’s highly interesting,” Müller writes, that “the Catholic Church flourishes in a country that is one of the most progressive in the world – and it doesn’t come without conflict.”
