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The many Sunday liturgies at St. Paul's in Bergen aim to accommodate a very diverse array of parishioners, but also to bind them as one community, in a manner that is both Norwegian and Catholic.

In the wake of a century-long of exodus from the traditional Maronite heartland, there are more Maronites living outside of Lebanon and Syria than in those lands.

Across the Philippine archipelago, a tradition known as Flores de Mayo, a daily offering of flowers to Mary, the mother of Jesus, is observed throughout the month of May. Typically the celebration culminates with a Santacruzan, part beauty pageant and part religious feast that marks the finding of the True Cross by Reyna Elena, or the queen St. Helena.

While Christian feasts still constitute most of the official holidays in Norway, they are observed in a mostly secular way. But Corpus Christi, celebrated in the streets of Bergen, sets Catholics apart.

Matters relating to family, sexual norms and gender serve to some degree as challenges or marks of differentiation when Catholics speak of their relationship to Norwegian culture.

Among interviewees in Bergen, a number of immigrant Catholics said without hesitation that as good as Norwegian Catholics were, they had little understanding of the Virgin Mary’s motherhood and her love and protection for us. Several Norwegian converts indicated they had a real adjustment to make to Catholic thinking about the role of the saints and intercessory prayer to them.

One native-born Norwegian noted, without a trace of rancor, that in a church with so many immigrants, it’s a not a matter of figuring out how to integrate the immigrants in the parish, but of how to integrate the Norwegians.

Surprisingly, in a city close to the northern periphery of the world — indeed, often perceived as beyond the periphery of the Catholic world — St. Paul’s stands out as probably one of the most diverse Catholic parishes. Some of the world’s major cities are home to a similar or even greater diversity of Catholics, but it is not clear there are any other places in the world that combine such diversity in a single parish.

The villages of Cizhong, Cigu and Niuren, where most residents are ethnically Tibetan and Naxi, and a fourth village, Xiaoweixi, where many villagers are Lisu, provide insight into the state of Catholic life in the Lancang River Valley today.

The churches at Cizhong and Xiaoweixi go to great lengths to memorialize, in little museums next to the churches, the French and Swiss missionaries who led these churches for so long.