The Hvalsey Option

Some time ago, I did an article on the other website about the ruins of Hvalsey church, the ruins of a Norse parish located on the southwestern coast of Greenland. It dates from the 10th century during the apex of Norse colonization. Hvalsey was part of the Greenlandic Norse "Eastern Settlement", which at its height contained only a few thousand Norse settlers scattered over a handful of towns and about 500 rural farmsteads. The settlement of Hvalsey gradually dwindled and was evacuated sometime in the 15th century; the last recorded activity there was a wedding in 1408.

The environment of southern Greenland is harsh and unforgiving. Even in the warmest months it seldom rises above 60° F. The winters are long, with blistering snows and gale force winds blowing in off the Atlantic. From November to January the night lasts twenty hours a day, covering the region in a kind of perpetual twilight. The shallow, rocky soil makes for poor farming; most of the Norse settlers survived off the grazing of cattle or hunting and fishing. Contact with mainland Europe (or even the Norse settlements at Iceland) was infrequent.

The Catholic Norse here were part of the now defunct Diocese of Gardar, which was administered by resident bishops from 1124 until the end of the 13th century, when communication between Greenland and Norway began to break down and the see went many years at a time without a bishop. 

Being historically minded, I have often wondered what it would be like to live out the Catholic faith in such a remote locale before the advent of modern communication. What would it have meant to be Catholic for these people? For Catholics living around the Hvalsey settlement, the universal Church would have had no other reality or expression other than what they experienced right then and there in their community. Their faith would have been radically localized. 

And there is nothing wrong with that. Remember, the Church's mark of universality/Catholicity means two things: (1) that local churches are universal because the profess the faith and administer the same sacraments that bind the Church Universal together, but also (2) because every local church is itself an expression of the Universal Church in a particular time and culture. The mark of Catholicity is as present in an isolated, cold stone church on the southern fjords of Greenland as it is in Rome or Paris, so long as the faith is being prayed and lived there. It is not necessary for a local church to be "plugged in" to the contemporary events of the Church Universal; being part of the Universal Church does not mean maintaining a certain degree of communication or media awareness of the events in Rome. It means living the faith of the Universal Church in your own local church.

It is doubtful the people of Hvalsey had any accurate knowledge of who the pope even was. In an age when it could take news four months to get from Rome just to Britain, the people of Hvalsey's knowledge of current events on the continent might have been two or three years outdated, probably more. The name of the pontiff mentioned in the Roman canon at Mass each week might have been a pope that had been dead for four years. Similarly, the mainland Norse had little knowledge of what was going on out in the Diocese of Gardar; once, in 1347, Norway ordained a new bishop to administer Gardar and sent him out to Greenland only to find the previous bishop was still alive. The communication was so sparse and it had been so long since word had come from Greenland that the Norse authorities assumed the previous bishop had died. There was a great chasm separating Hvalsey and the Norse settlements from the outside world, at least in terms of keeping atop of current events.

If the Hvalsey congregation had no certain knowledge of who the pope was, they certainly weren't abreast of the latest gossip going on in the Roman Curia. The pope to them would have been a very distant juridical concept, someone whose existence they knew of and whose authority they acknowledged but whose judgments rarely if ever touched their lives personally—similarly to how an American might view the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, except even more remote since we at least know who John Roberts is and what he looks like. The pope was not someone who impacted their daily life, if they even knew who he was.

My friends, that is how I have been living these past few years. Not burying my head in the sand and ignoring bad things I hear, but remembering that the expression of the Universal Church that affects me most is the one right in front of me that makes up the community I live in. My actual, tangible experience of the Catholic Church is not what is happening in Rome, but what is happening in my parish, in my community, or in front of the quaint little candle-lit altar in my own home. But when it comes to Rome, I'm mentally existing as if I'm in the Hvalsey settlement in the year 1000. That's my option for living the faith in these troubled days.

Stuff in the Vatican is getting wilder by the day. I'm thankful there's sites like 1 Peter 5 covering it, and I'm sad there's people whose faith is being harmed by the scandals. It hasn't harmed my faith, though, and for me it is simply one of those things where I shrug, say some extra prayers for the Church in my daily routine, and go back to reading more wholesome spiritual materials from an earlier time. What's going on is objectively bad, but there is a sense in which focusing too intensively on it can be damaging. I am not saying to ignore the realities we are in or totally disconnect, but I am saying let us remember that the ground beneath our feet is the most appropriate locus of action for bringing Christ to the world. Think local. Act local. Pray local. If the Church needs exemplars of faithful Christian living, be that example in your own community.