Editorial: From indulgence to profit
We do not find it necessary to make a fuss about the fact that the church is financing itself by being a shareholder in Scandinavia's largest beer brewery. But it is worse that the fund is making money on arms, environmental scandals, and harassment of indigenous peoples. There is a particular irony to it that the church through the fund has a commercial interest in Norsk Hydro, when both the Church Council, the Norwegian Church Aid, the Stromme Memorial Foundation, and ecclesial groups in India protest loudly against Hydro's prestige bauxite project in Orissa in India, the Utkal project.
In the old days the Church scared people with purgatory to collect money. Today it obviously thinks that the best way to finance priesthood and religious children's choirs is by Norwegian multinational companies' ravages in other countries. Is this to be interpreted as a demonstration of modernization?
Norwatch Newsletter 6/98