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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.

Catholicism in the Lancang Valley amalgamates elements of Western Catholic, Chinese and Tibetan traits, using bright colors and unusual architectural combinations. It often synthesizes Western 19th- and 20th-century pious images with elements of Chinese and Tibetan visual culture to form a rich visual mix.

St. Joseph and Mary are patron saints of China, which explains in small part why they are so prominent, but St. Francis Xavier, who was also designated as a patron, is largely not visible today.

Worship in the Tibetan and Naxi villages of the Lancang River valley entails two very different ways of praying — a rich and indigenized tradition of sung chant that is perhaps unique in the Catholic world, and an imported form of liturgical worship that at times seems to be not quite “at home” yet there.

In a remote corner of the world where few outsiders would ever expect to find Catholic communities, Tibetan, Naxi and Lisu peoples practice the faith in villages along the high altitude river valleys close to the borders of Burma and Tibet.