He also rented a small room in a house belonging to the Catholic Vauvert family in the Osebakken neighborhood of Porsgrunn, and made it into a makeshift chapel to hold sermons.

The chapel was also used to hold meetings for some Sisters of St. Joseph of Chambéry who had moved to the area from Oslo with the intention of starting a hospital there.

The sisters had moved to Norway in the 1840s after Storting lifted the ban on non-Protestant public religious services, and they would eventually go on to build hospitals in five different Norwegian cities.

Construction began on 4 January 1899, by the firm Thovsen & Torjussen, who enlisted the talents of many local craftsmen for detail work.

The church cost about 12,000 kroner in all, which was funded in part by a significant donation from local politician and Catholic convert Carl P. Wright.

However, in the 1930s a change in Porsgrunn's road system left the church in a very inconvenient location, and a planned new Folkets hus would leave it almost boxed in.

Suddenly the Catholic church was the center of all attention, especially when the building stood for a few days in the middle of the street, blocking all traffic.

Our Lady of Good Counsel's membership includes people of about 80 different nationalities, and it holds mass in four languages: Norwegian, English, Polish, and Vietnamese.

Of the parish's population, only slightly over half were born in Norway, with the next most common nationalities being Vietnamese, Filipino, and Polish.

When the lendmann Dag Eilivsson returned home from the Norwegian Crusade, he was inspired by the monastic life he had seen while wintering in southern England.