Two women - one a Finn, another a lesbian - ordained as Church of Sweden bishops

Churches of England and Ireland boycott the ordaining ceremony

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By Anna-Liina Kauhanen
     
      The ceiling of Uppsala Cathedral is certainly high.
      There is some stir in the nave of the largest cathedral in the Nordic Countries, but it soon turns to silence, when King Carl-Gustav and Queen Silvia take their seats, nicely cushioned with red velvet. Others have to settle for harder surfaces.
     
The bells toll. Soon two women will be ordained as bishops of the Church of Sweden. One of them will soon be the Bishop of Härnösand. She is the Finnish-born Dean of Uppsala Diocese Tuulikki Koivunen Bylund, 62.
      The other, 55-year-old Eva Brunne, is about to become the Bishop of Stockholm.
      Brunne will also be Sweden’s first homosexual bishop. She lives in a registered relationship with another woman. The relationship has also been blessed by the church.
      The cathedral is full. Over 1,300 people are present. But not every invited guest has showed up.
     
The leaders of the English and Irish Anglican Churches remain absent. The reason is Brunne’s lesbianism. Plus the Church of Sweden’s October decision to start joining people of the same sex in marriage.
      Lapua Bishop Simo Peura was supposed to represent the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland, but he, too, cancelled his attendance. According to Risto Cantell, executive director at the Department for International Relations of the Church of Finland, Peura’s nonattendance was not an expression of attitude, however, but merely a case of his falling ill.
      “And this is not a political illness”, Cantell declares firmly.
      Archbishop Anders Wejryd speaks of equality and the ability to cooperate. When Koivunen Bylund and Brunne have received their bishop's cassocks, crosiers and pectoral crosses - Koivunen Bylund’s cross is over 400 years old - they turn towards the churchgoers.
     
The audience breaks out into rousing applause that rings in the gothic vaults and towers all the way to the twin pinnacles, up there at 118.7 metres above ground level.
      The Church of Sweden has just ordained its fourth and fifth female bishops. Previously three of the Swedish Evangelical Lutheran church’s 13 bishops and archbishop were women. Eva Brunne is in fact replacing a female bishop in Stockholm. Caroline Krook held the position from 1998 until her retirement this year.
     
After the ceremony the bishops and the royal couple pose for a group photograph on the steps of the church. A cold drizzle from above numbs the fingers, but the bishops smile warmly at the congratulating audience.
      Stockholm bishop Eva Brunne becomes more serious when she is asked about the stir brought on by her homosexuality.
      “I am very surprised by the reaction from other churches, but I am here to show them the way”, Brunne says.
      “The Church of Sweden is not really a forerunner, but it does keep up with the Swedish population.”
     
Brunne plans to bring forward the position of the sexual minorities also as a bishop.
      “I am now in a different position of authority, and the matter is important to me also on the personal level.”
      According Härnösand Bishop Tuulikki Koivunen Bylund, a lesbian bishop is an issue to which the reaction in the Swedish church is unconstrained.
      “In this respect the Finnish Lutheran Church is a couple of decades behind its Swedish counterpart.”
      Koivunen Bylund’s ordination as a bishop also says something about the Church of Sweden. “The church is not nationalistic.”
      In 2005 Koivunen Bylund, who hails originally from the city of Turku in the southwest of Finland, applied for the Bishopric of Turku, but was not elected.
     
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 9.11.2009


Links:
  Church of Sweden (Wikipedia)
  Church of Sweden website

ANNA-LIINA KAUHANEN / Helsingin Sanomat
anna-liina.kauhanen@hs.fi