First native son to lead modern Catholic Finland retires

Following a period of ill health, Finland’s first native-born bishop of the modern era retired early today.. Marking his 72nd birthday, Bishop Teemu Sippo announced the news in a letter to the faithful. Bishop Sippo headed the Diocese of Helsinki, which covers all of Finland, since 2009. He cites his ailing health, worsened by a fall at Christmas time, as the reason for his retirement

The previous sede vacante of Helsinki lasted almost a year, so the appointment of a new bishop of one of the northernmost dioceses in the world could still be some time in the future.

The Diocese of Helsinki was established as the Apostolic Vicariate of Finland in 1920, from territory belonging to the Archdiocese of Mohilev, which then included large parts of Russia. Finland had only just gained its independence from Russia, which was in the midst of post-Revolution civil war.

In the first three years of its existence, an Apostolic Administrator would lead the new circumscription: the Dutch priest, Fr. Michiel Buckx, a priest of the Congregation of the Priests of the Sacred Heart, or Dehonians. Fr. Buckx would be appointed as the first vicar apostolic in 1923, and was made a bishop as well. He would be suceeded in 1933 be another Dutchman, Bishop Gulielmus Cobben, another Dehonian. When the apostolic vicariate was promoted to the Diocese of Helsinki in 1955, Bishop Cobben continued as bishop of Helsinki. In 1964 he recieved a coadjutor bishop, again a Dutch Dehonian, Bishop Paul Verschuren. He succeeded Bishop Cobben in 1967 and remained in office until 1998, during which period he served four terms as president of the Scandinavian bishops’ conference, the first from 1973 to 1978, and the other three from 1986 to 1998. Bishop Verschuren was succeeded by another Dehonian, but one from Poland this time. Bishop Józef Wróbel served from 2000 to 2008, after which he returned to Poland to become an auxiliary bishop of Lublin. In 2009, Fr. Teemu Sippo, who had served as apostolic administrator following the reassignment of Bishop Wróbel, was appointed as the first Finnish bishop of Helsinki. He was consecrated in the Lutheran cathedral of Helsinki by Cardinal Karl Lehmann of Mainz, Bishop Wróbel and Copenhagen’s Bishop Czeslaw Kozon. Cardinal Lehmann had been Bishop Sippo’s thesis advisor when he studied in Freiburg in the 1970s.

Of the 5.5 million inhabitants of Finland, only some 14,00 are Catholic. These are spread over some 340,000 square kilometers and are served by some 30 priests. The Diocese of Helsinki consists of 8 parishes.

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For Scandinavia, a nuncio used to great distances

Pope Francis today appointed a new apostolic nuncio to Sweden and Iceland. These two non-adjacent countries will undoubtedly soon be joined by Finland, Norway and Denmark as the new nuncio’s area of operations. The Nordic countries, although they each have their own nunciature in name*, have always shared one nuncio among them.

An expansive territory to cover, made even more expansive by the Scandinavian bishops regularly meeting in Germany, it is now under the diplomatic responsibility of no stranger to large distances. Archbishop James Patrick Green, 66, comes to Scandinavia from his previous posting in Peru, where he has been the nuncio since 2012. His other postings include the southern tip of Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland) from 2006 to 2012, and China, where he was Chargé d’affaires, from 2002 to 2006. Earlier in his diplomatic career, he also served at the nunciature in the Netherlands.

Archbishop Green was born in Philadelphia, USA, in 1950, and was ordained a priest for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia by its then-archbishop Cardinal John Krol. In 2006, upon his appointment as nuncio to South Africa, Namibia and Botswana (Lesotho and Swaziland would follow later), he was consecrated and named as titular archbishop of Altinum.

Archbishop Green is characterised as “accessible, friendly, gracious and impressively capable”, and is credited with creating a stable episcopate in southern Africa. In Scandinavia, with only six serving bishops, he will have rather less chances to do so. The most senior Nordic bishop, Helsinki’s Teemu Sippo, is 69, followed by Stockholm’s Anders Arborelius at 67, and Copenhagen’s Czeslaw Kozon, who is 65. Although a bishop can retire before the age of 75 for health reasons, the expectation is that it will be another six years before Archbishop Green needs to get to work to collect information for a new bishop. The nuncio himself is still nine years away from retirement, so it is possible that he will be reassigned before that, especiallty considering that he never spent more than five years at his earlier assignments.

The Catholic Church in Scandinavia is growing, mostly due to immigration from traditionally Catholic countries like Poland and the Philippines. It is still numerically small, though, and exists in highly secular societies: many people nominally belong to the Lutheran church which, until fairly recently, was the state church in most Nordic countries, but most will consider themselves atheist or agnostic. The immigrant population differs in that respect from the native Scandinavians, and this will undoubtedly affect how the Church acts and is perceived.

The appointment of a new nuncio was no surprise. Archbishop Green’s predecessor, Archbishop Henryk Nowacki, nuncio since 2012, had already announced his early retirement. At 70, he retires for health reasons.

*Finland was the first in 1966 to get a full diplomatic representation in the form of a nuncio, followed by Iceland in 1976. Denmark and Norway followed in 1982, leaving Sweden to change the old offices of the Apostolic Delegation of Scandinavia into the Nunciature of Sweden. The nuncio still resides in Stockholm, in the northern subburb of Djursholm, although the general secretariat of the Nordic Bishops’ Conference is located in Copenhagen.

Phot credit: Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, Peru

Synod of Bishops – Day Six

With the Saturday sessions, presided by Cardinal Monsengwo Pasinya (pictured), the Synod of Bishops wrapped up its first week. As usual, there were interventions, 24 by Synod fathers and one by a fraternal delegate.

The Patriarch of Venice, Francesco Moraglia, made an important point about catechesis and youth:

“[T]he majority of young people, once their Christian initiation is complete, lose their relationship with the Church, the faith, God. There are multiple causes for this: however, I believe that in a not insignificant number of cases the faith is not supported by a catechesis that is friendly towards reason, able to offer a true anthropological instruction and able to legitimize the plausibility of the Christian choice. It is necessary to relaunch the CCC, giving greater space to its content in order to avoid reduction to a “do-it-yourself” faith; the fides quae is often missing from our catechesis.”

Other topics discussed were the personal experiences in the social pastoral field of several countries, but also, once more, the use of mass media in the new evangelisation.

Cardinal George Alencherry had interesting things to say about the lives and ministries of priests in recent decades:

“During the 50 years after Vatican II, the renewal of the Church has been multifaceted and highly productive. At the same time the lives and ministry of priests and men and women of consecrated life have become more functional than spiritual and ecclesial. It would seem that the present-day formation of priests and the religious personnel tends to make them functionaries for different offices in the Church, rather than missionaries inflamed by the love of Christ. Even in places of ad gentes missions of the Church, functioning through institutions have made the priests and the religious lose the impelling force and strength of the Gospel to which they are committed by their vocation. Secularization has impacted the lives of individual Christians and also of ecclesial communities. New Evangelization demands a thorough renewal of the lives of individual Christians and the reevaluation of the structures of the Church to empower them with the dynamism of the Gospel values of truth, justice, love, peace and harmony.”

Bishop António Da Rocha Couto (pictured), of Lamego in Portugal, asked himself, his fellow Synod fathers, and in extension all of us,

“Yes, we need proclaimers of the Gospel who are without gold, silver, copper, bags, two tunics… Yes, it is of conversion that I speak, and I ask myself this question: why did the Saints fight so hard, and with so much joy, to be poor and meek, while we work so hard to be rich and important?”

Bishop Berislav Grgic, prelate of Tromsø in Norway, painted the following picture of the Church in Scandinavia:

“The Catholic Church in the Northern Lands – Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden – is a very small minority and therefore has neither the advantages nor the disadvantages that the Catholic Church often comes across in traditional and prevalently Catholic regions. Despite its limited relevance, numeric as well as social, our Church is nonetheless a growing Church. New churches are built or bought, new parishes are instituted, non-Latin rites are added, there is a relatively high number of adult conversions and baptisms, there are vocations to priesthood and to religious life, the number of baptisms is much higher than the number of deaths and number of those who abandon the Church, and attendance at Sunday Mass is relatively high.
In certain sectors of society there is great interest for the faith and spirituality, by non-believers who are searching for the truth as well as by Christians committed to other religions who wish to deepen and enrich religious life. It is also interesting to see that during the past years a relatively high number of contemplative orders have opened their own convents.
The transmission of the faith, often however, is made difficult because of the vast distances. Our priests must travel far – sometimes up to 2,000 km per month – to visit our faithful who live in distant places and celebrate Mass. This is very tiring during the winter months.”

The fraternal delegate who also intervened was Dr. Geoffrey Tunnicliffe, general secretary of the World Evangelical Alliance. He spoke about ‘holistic evangelism,’ evangelisation which lies at the heart of the person and which is radically committed to worl evangelisation.

Following the interventions, the composition of the Commission for Information, supplying media and interested parties with information about the Synod, was announced. The Commission is chaired by Archbishop Claudio Celli, the president of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, with Archbishop Ján Babjak, of Prešov of the Catholics of the Byzantine Rite in Slovakia, serving as vice president. The other regular members of the Commission are:

Archbishop John Onaiyekan, of Abuja, Nigeria
Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz, of Minsk-Mohilev, Belarus
Bishop Manuel Macário do Nascimento Clemente, of Porto, Portugal
Archbishop José Gómez, of Los Angeles, United States
Archbishop Francis Kovithavanij, of Bangkok, Thailand

There are two members ex officio: Archbishop Pierre-Marie Carré, the Synod’s general secretary, and Archbishop Nikola Eterovic, secretary general of the Synod of Bishops.

Lastly, Father Federico Lombardi, director of the Holy See Press Office, serves as secretary ex officio.

In the afternoon the interventions continued, this time by 15 Synod fathers. Father Heinrich Walter, Superior General of the Schönstatt Fathers, spoke about the role of the family in the renewal of the Church in the west:

“The family remains the foundation for learning the faith. The family means seeing one’s home as the house of God. Children, with their parents, follow the lengthy path in learning the faith. The vitality of a community is connected to these homes. Families are not only the privileged location for evangelization, but inasmuch as they are laity they are also agents of evangelization.”

Bishop Leonardo Ulrich Steiner (pictured), auxiliary bishop of Brasilia, raised an interesting point. He said, “New evangelization should take youths into consideration as ‘new agents’ of evangelization: the young who evangelize the young.” Rather than seeing young people strictly as ‘consumers’ of catechesis and education, it should be possible to turn some of them also into educators themselves. That would mean a different focus on the sort of catechesis presented to young people. Not only would they need to be able to learn, but also to teach by example and certainly also through being catechists themselves.

Country by country – a new nuncio for the north

After almost six months, the Nordic countries are once again supplied with an official ambassador from the Holy See. This new Apostolic Nuncio is Archbishop Henryk Józef Nowacki, until today the Apostolic Nuncio to Nicaragua.

Appointed today to Sweden and Iceland – Denmark, Norway and Finland will almost certainly follow in due course – 65-year-old Archbishop Nowacki is of German descent and was ordained a priest for the Polish Diocese of Tarnów in 1970. In 1983, he began to work in the Holy See’s diplomatic service in Paraguay and Angola, and later at the Secretariat of State in Rome. In 2001, he became the Nuncio to Slovakia and was given the titular see of Blera near Rome. He was consecrated by Blessed Pope John Paul II. In 2007, he was appointed to Nicaragua, and today his third posting followed.

Archbishop Nowacki came under fire in 2007 when he was identified as a Communist collaborator in the 1970s. Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, the archbishop of Kraków, came strongly to his defence, but nothing more seems to have come from the affair. Both Dziwisz and Blessed John Paul II seemed to consider or have considered Archbishop Nowacki an industrious and loyal collaborator and friend. This latest appointment certainly does not seem to indicate a change in that opinion from the part of Pope Benedict XVI.

Photo credit: Ján Duda

From the north to the south

Lost amid the Christmas celebrations, the onset of the new year and the announcement of a consistory, is the news that, on 5 January, the Holy Father appointed Archbishop Emil Paul Tscherrig to be the new Papal Nuncio to Argentina. In the past four years, Archbishop Tscherrig was Nuncio to the Nordic countries: Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Sweden and Finland. In Argentina, the Swiss-born prelate succeeds Archbishop Adriano Bernardini, who was called to Italy last November.

The diplomatic mission of the Holy See in Scandinavia dates from 1960, when it was established as an apostolic delegation. In 1966, Finland got a Nunciature, followed ten years later by Iceland. In 1982, the Nunciatures to Norway and Denmark were branched off and the remainder of the Apostolic Delegation to Scandinavia became the Nunciature to Sweden. Although each Nunciature is its own entity with its own diplomatic relations with the state it resides in, a single Nuncio has always been appointed to all of them, a reflection of the fact that the Nordic countries are home to relatively few Catholics.

In Argentina, Archbishop Tscherrig will begin his fifth diplomatic mission, after having represented the Holy See in Burundi, the Antilles, Korea and Mongolia and Scandinavia.

Photo credit: Korea Times

The other bishops

“The main point we must consider is that a bishop isn’t just a bishop on his own. He is a bishop of a Church and that Church must be somewhere.  In ancient times there were very many more dioceses, which were effectively swept away either by invasion of Muslims or the erosion of demographics, etc.  In more modern times, in the “propaganda” countries, Sees were sometimes established, but the town lost importance for one reason or another and it became impractical to maintain the see there.”

Words from Father Z in this blog post, in which he answers a question about titular dioceses and the rights that bishops may or may not have in them. It prompted me to take a look at the titular sees in my neck of the woods, continental north western Europe. In nine countries (Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden), it turns out, there are only seven of those. Compared to southern Europe, north Africa and the Middle East, that is very few indeed, but it does allow for an easy overview of which titular sees they are and who is appointed to them. In other words, who are the other bishops in these countries*?

Let’s take an alphabetical look.

Bishop Budzik

We start way up north, in Iceland, with the titular see of Hólar. Currently all of Iceland is part of the Diocese of Reykjavík, but in the twelfth century there were two others, once of which was Hólar. It was suppressed in 1550, after which the island fell under various ecclesiastical jurisdictions. The village of Hólar lies on Iceland’s northern coast and nowadays is home to  some 100 people. In the past it was the heart of Iceland’s Catholicism and a major centre of learning. Today, it is the titular see of Bishop Stanisław Budzik, auxiliary bishop of the Polish diocese of Tarnów.

Next is one of the two titular sees located in Belgium. Ieper (in Dutch) or Ypres (in French) was one of the dioceses established in answer to the Reformation in the Low Countries. Unlike the dioceses further north, it existed for a fair amount of time. It wasn’t until 1801, when it was suppressed to become part of the Diocese of Gent. The establishment of the diocese reflected its importance as a commercial trading city and also its origins as a French enclave in the Holy Roman Empire. Its current titular bishop is one of the three new auxiliary bishops of the Archdiocese of Mechelen-Brussels, Msgr. Jean Kockerols.

Not far from there lies the third see on our list, and the only Dutch titular see: Maastricht. It can trace its origins to the first arrival of Christianity in the Netherlands. It was created in 530 from the Diocese of Tongeren and Maastricht and survived for almost two centuries. In 720 it was incorporated into the powerful Diocese of Liège, an indication that the centre of Catholic gravity in that area had moved south. Bishop Marco Pérez Caicedo is the titular bishop of Maastricht. In daily life he is one of the auxiliary bishops of the Archdiocese of Guayaquil in Ecuador.

Bishop Sudar

From Maastricht we go back to Scandinavia, to Norway where, in 1070, a Diocese of Selja was established. Also know as Selia, the titular see is based on a tiny island near the city of Bergen and is the predecessor of the Diocese of Bergen. In fact, it was named so only 10 years after its establishment, and survived until the Reformation. It was suppressed in 1537. The current titular bishop is Auxiliary Bishop Pero Sudar of Vrhbosna in Bosnia and Hercegovina.

Then back to Belgium it is, to the ancient titular see of Tongeren or Tongres. This is the oldest diocese in the Low Countries, established in 344 from Cologne. From here, the Diocese of Maastricht was established in 530, the same year that saw the end of Tongeren as a diocese. Later, it was one of the seeds for the powerful prince-bishopric of Liège. Like Belgium’s other titular see, a Belgian bishop holds it. He is Msgr. Pierre Warin, auxiliary of the nearby Diocese of Namur.

That leaves only two titular dioceses on our list, and both are currently vacant. The first is Chiemsee in Germany, that country’s only titular see. It’s been vacant for a long time: it’s last titular bishop was Bishop Sigmund Christoph, Count of Waldburg-Zeil-Trauchburg. His tenure ended in 1808.

The last diocese on our last takes us back to our starting point, Iceland. When Hólar was an important centre in the north, its equivalent in the south was the Diocese of Skálholt. It’s history is very similar to that of Hólar, although it is a few years older. It is vacant, but it hasn’t been for as long as Chiemsee. It’s last titular bishop died in 2008, and he was Dutch: Bishop Alphons Castermans, auxiliary of Roermond.

Skálholt today

*Not that these bishops have any rights or duties in their titular sees, as Father Z explains in the aforementioned post.

In with the new – Abp. Eijk for president

Following the retirement of the current president of the Dutch Bishops’ Conference, Bishop Ad van Luyn, effective on 2 July, the Dutch bishops elected the archbishop of Utrecht and metropolitan of the Netherlands, Msgr. Wim Eijk, to succeed him. Bishop Frans Wiertz of Roermond stays on as vice-president. The new appointment becomes effective upon the installation of Bishop Hans van den Hende as the new bishop of Rotterdam, on the aforementioned date of 2 July.

When Archbishop Eijk was appointed to Utrecht in 2007, he said that he would be focussing on his new diocese and would not immediately seek the position of president of the conference. Now, four years later, he has, and it was really just a matter of time. Generally, the metropolitan of a Church province, is also the president of that provinces bishops’ conference. And if not, the function does tend to go to an archbishop. In northwestern Europe, there are four bishops’ conferences (Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and Scandinavia) and now only one of these is headed by a president who is not an archbishop. That is the Scandinavian conference with Bishop Anders Arborelius of Stockholm. And that province has no archbishops or metropolitan. So Archbishop Eijk’s new appointment fits in with the general trend.

Photo credit: RTV Utrecht