At 6pm today in the parish of St Thomas in Lund, a Te Deum will be held in thanksgiving for the appointment as cardinal of Bishop Anders Arborelius. There will be a toast following the celebration at the invitation of the parish priest Johan Lindén, who said in an interview published today in the Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet that the Bishop “was in Lund on Saturday. Even if his see is Stockholm, he often comes here because here he was raised and converted”. This is “great news” to the parish priest, and “we will need time to digest it”. Fr. Lindén sees it as a decision in line with Francis’ policy” of “placing cardinals from the world’s peripheries alongside those from traditional Catholic countries”. “Even if we are a minority in Sweden, our Church is growing and is very dynamic and lively. Just in Lund, we are serving some 5,000 people from 90 countries”. The news of the nomination as cardinal of the Bishop of Stockholm, “a wonderful person with a profound spirituality”, was “welcomed with joy in Sweden”, the Swedish television (SVT) reports. There are some 150,000 Catholics in the country out of a population of 10 million. In an interview with SVT, the newly elected cardinal said this came as a surprise to him; when he heard the news on Sunday as he was administering confirmations at Olofström, he “thought it was a joke”.