Purely Õunapuu

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Rein Õunapuu (born July 19, 1957 in Tallinn , Estonian SSR ) is a Catholic clergyman.

Rein Õunapuu grew up in the Soviet- annexed Estonia at first without any relation to religion , but at the age of 16 he found access to the Evangelical Church and was baptized. In the period that followed, shaped by the political and religious conditions in his homeland, but not least also by the privations of two years of compulsory military service in the Soviet army, he converted to Catholicism at the age of 21 . In 1981 he entered the seminary in Riga , Latvia , which at that time was the only Catholic theological training facility in the Soviet Union, along with that in Kaunas , Lithuania .

Rein Õunapuu was ordained a priest on October 6, 1985 in Riga and worked there as a chaplain for a few months . On June 28, 1986 he was appointed chaplain in his hometown of Tallinn and on March 2, 1987, chaplain in Prohladnaju, Russia . On July 20, 1987, he returned to Estonia to take over the two parishes in Tallinn and Tartu . At that time he was the only Catholic priest in Estonia. Not least by taking advantage of intensive contacts with Paul Verschuren , the Bishop of Helsinki , through whom he also maintained the connection with the Holy See , he succeeded with great commitment in dealing with the situation of the small church in Estonia in the difficult phase of upheaval through numerous baptisms (approx. 200) and conversions (approx. 150) to stabilize and to continue to establish despite the changing living conditions of the people. In 1991, Rein Õunapuu, an Estonian clergyman, took part for the first time in a European Synod of Bishops , where his presentation on the situation of the Catholic Church in Estonia not only received a lot of attention, but also led to the Vatican for the first time having very specific ideas about the judicial reorganization of the Baltic States , Russia and the successor states of the Soviet Union.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Õunapuu saw the continuation of his work no longer guaranteed. In 1996 he came to Sankt Georgen , the Jesuit College in Frankfurt, where he obtained a licentiate in theology . Then, in 1999, he became a chaplain in Wolfsburg , then from 2002 parish vicar in Hildesheim-Drispenstedt and from 2004 pastor in Braunschweig . Rein Õunapuu has been a pastor in Peine since 2010 .