Sharing the very sad news of the passing on Saturday 2nd December 2023 of the Reverend Eero Sepponen, a good friend to, and longest-serving locum priest of, the Anglican Church in St Petersburg.
Ordained as a Church of Finland ("ELCF") priest in 1967, Eero pastored to Swedish-speaking congregations in the Åland Islands and in Turku (Åbo) as well as, from 1991, in St Petersburg, at the revived Swedish parish of S:ta Katarina (which was under the Diocese of Borgå, the ELCF diocese for Swedish-speakers, and was never part of the Church of Sweden).And later, following the signing in 1996 of the Porvoo Declaration between the Anglican Churches in Britain & Ireland and the Lutheran churches in the Nordic & Baltic countries, Eero held an Archbishop's Permission to Officiate which put him in the same position as a Clerk in Holy Orders of the Church of England and enabled him, on his monthly visits from Turku, to combine his leadership of S:ta Katarina's with support for the Anglican congregation in St Petersburg, becoming for so many the face of Anglican worship in the city.
Eero also served as a link between the original Anglican Church in St Petersburg, which, as the English Church, operated from 1723 until 1919, and the current Anglican congregation, which reformed in 1993, as he had met several of the "Saint Petersburg Ladies" while visiting the Anglican Church in Helsinki as a young student in the late 1950s.
These ladies, who, prior to the Russian Revolution, had lived and worked as part of the British colony in St Petersburg, worshipping at the English Church, found refuge after 1917 in Finland where they helped to establish, and became the backbone of, the Anglican congregation in Helsinki. (For more on the "Saint Petersburg Ladies", see this 2013 piece on them by Diana Webster, originally published in the St Nicholas' Church newsletter).
And at home in Kaarina, Eero continued his support for Porvoo and Lutheran-Anglican unity through his involvement with the Turku Cathedral International Congregation ("TCIC"), often assisting at their monthly English-language Anglican (CW) services.A passionate ecumenist and keen student of church history, Eero's knowledge and understanding of the religious landscape in St Petersburg was second to none. He co-authored a book on the history of the Ingrian parish of Tyrö (modern Martyshkino in St Petersburg’s Lomonosov district) and his many years of research on the Catholic Apostolic Church in Imperial Petersburg and Helsingfors, while not culminating in the originally intended doctorate, served to make him a leading expert on the Irvingites.