In a historic move, Mgr. Teemu Sippo is appointed as Roman Catholic Bishop of Helsinki

Previous Finnish holder of the position dates back five centuries

Mgr. Teemu Sippo

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The new Roman Catholic Bishop of Helsinki is Mgr. Teemu Sippo, 62.
      Following his appointment by His Holiness Pope Benedictus XVI on Tuesday, Sippo will be ordained in September.
      Sippo takes up the position from his present role as Diocesan Administrator.
      He says he is delighted with the news, but also fully cognisant of the duties and expectations that will be placed on his shoulders in his new role.
     
The small Roman Catholic community in Finland - it has barely 10,000 members and the country has Europe's lowest proportion of Catholics in the population - is treated as a single diocese, and hence Sippo will effectively be the "Bishop of Finland".
      The Catholic Church in Finland is not an independent entity in the same way as the Evangelical Lutheran Church, but is governed from The Vatican in Rome by the Pope and the Curia.
     
The appointment is not merely of personal significance to Monsignor Sippo and his flock, but has a distinctly historic ring to it.
      It is not the first time a Finn has led the Finnish Roman Catholic Church, but one does have to go back a very long way indeed to find a native-born predecessor.
      Owing to the fact that most of the Catholic congregation hereabouts are actually foreigners - Poles make up a sizeable share - the general tendency has been for a foreign-born prelate to head the Finnish Roman Catholic Church, for instance the outgoing Bishop of Helsinki, Polish-born Jósef Wróbel, or Wróbel's immediate predecessor, the late Paul Verschuren, who was Dutch.
     
The last natural-born Finn to hold the office was Arvid Kurki, who is believed to have lived from 1464-1522, and was then the Roman Catholic Bishop of Turku (1510-1522).
      Helsinki was not yet founded in the early 16th century, let alone the capital of Finland, and Kurki's tenure even predates the Reformation.
      On Tuesday, Sippo's appointment already prompted a good deal of feedback.
      "Many have felt it was important that a Finn has been named to the position; someone who knows the culture and the churches in Finland and who speaks Finnish."
     
Sippo was born in Lahti in 1947, and studied in Freiburg in Germany, graduating as a Diplomtheologe in 1976. He made his first vows in the Congregation of the Priests of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in 1970, and was ordained as a priest in 1977.
      He took up the position of Diocesan Administrator last year, when Jósef Wróbel was transferred to become Suffragan Bishop of the Archdiocese of Lublin in his native Poland.


Links:
  Roman Catholicism in Finland (Wikipedia)
  Catholic.fi - Mgr. Teemu Sippo, SCJ

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