“Estonian society is waiting with some optimism for the successful conclusion of its integration into the European Union. The majority of the population is in favour of such a step, but there’s also an important minority of eurosceptics who especially fear, on the basis of past experience, a threat to the country’s real independence, a loss of its identity and its capacity for self-determination”. That’s how Msgr. Stephan Zurbriggen, apostolic administrator of Estonia, describes the mood of the Baltic country on the eve of its entry into the EU. “We Catholics hope that this return to the great European family will help and encourage us to respond to the challenges of the new evangelization. Moreover, we want to be faithful to the exhortation of the Holy Father to rediscover “the cultural and spiritual unity of Europe to which the Christian tradition has made a fundamental contribution through the centuries and continues to do so today” (John Paul II). In this sense, with Estonia’s membership of the EU, an opportunity is also offered to the Catholic Church to promote, as far as its limited possibilities allow it to do so, a knowledge of its own cultural and religious heritage”. Today the Catholic community in Estonia consists of little more than 4,000 baptized, the smallest of any European country. It does, however, have a multicultural and plurinational character and lives in a situation of diaspora; it consists of a mixture of Estonians, Poles, Lithuanians, Belorussians. There are only 4 Catholic priests and 7 religious. The Church also runs 1 nursery and 1 elementary school. Estonia, like the other two Baltic states, long suffered the oppression of the Soviet Union, which has left “an enormous moral and spiritual void and a profoundly scarred society”. “The hope is concludes Msgr. Zurbriggen that entry into the EU may strengthen the bonds of solidarity that already happily exist with many brothers and sisters in various countries of the European Union”.
