Tapani Ruotsalainen is a pastor of the Lutheran church, and is in charge of a community near Lapland. In this interview he offers for Word a personal testimony about the meaning of the Protestant Reformation and the ecumenical effort that impresses with its honesty.
–Raimo Goyarrola, Helsinki
¿What has the Lutheran Reformation meant to you?
-I'm from a small town in northern Finland. When I was a child, if you were a Christian, the only possibility to belong to the Church was in the Lutheran Church. When it came to church, for me it was only the Lutheran Church. In the north of the country there were neither Catholics nor Orthodox. There were some members of the Free Reformed Churches, but very few.
When I was in high school I heard about the Catholic Church in religion class and in history class. I must admit that it was a very partial view, totally biased from the Lutheran point of view. In the 1960s-1970s the Finnish media hardly reported about the Catholic Church. Today the situation has radically changed....
