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The article gives a statistical overview and confessional perspectives on the female Catholic nursing-orders in Denmark from 1856 to the present. In focus are the Catholic orders which to some extend are compared to the Protestant deaconesses of the country. The background is that in Denmark in 1849 the Danish Constitution introduced freedom of worship, and in 1856 the first Catholic nursing- order settled in Denmark. Today 27 different female catholic orders/congregations have been or still are in Denmark. Ten of these orders were nursing-orders and six of them, comprising 90 percent of the Catholic sisters in Denmark, opened 16 general hospitals in the period 1875-1931. Within these hospitals they made their greatest contribution to Danish society between 1920 and 1940, when numbered 537-775 sisters and owning ten percent of the hospital beds in Denmark. The deaconesses comprised a similar amount of sisters and they owned two percent of the hospital beds. The deaconesses were Danish but the Catholic sisters came from abroad. Consequently, they had cultural ballast in terms of another nationality and an approach to Christianity, which differed from the Danish Lutheranism. The encounter between these two cultures was not always friendly, as the sisters were facing a society where the general opinion was that Catholicism was dangerous. The lack of vocations and the development of the Danish welfare state 1930-1970 by and large ended the Catholic nursing-orders hospitals. Despite the fact that they were a significant part of the Danish welfare project, they have never been included in the Danish history.

The article surveys the development of the concept of 'tradition' in the Roman-Catholic Church, with special regard to the 19th century and the First Vatican Council in 1870. Both the political and the ideological context of this development is taken into consideration, and the thinking of important theologians like Johann Adam Möhler, John Henry Newman and Giovanni Perrone is commented upon. The dogma of the papal infallacy is interpreted both as a result of the conscious strategy building of Pius IX (pope 1846-1878), as a construction meant to serve the 19th century mariology, and as a more general ideological solution to questions raised by modern historical research. Despite the fact that even the Protestant parts of Europe obviously found the concept of 'tradition' a fruitful one, the article argues the differences between the Roman-Catholic and the Protestant concepts.