Tālivaldis Kronbergs recalls two years with the Jesuits and Latvia's Catholic revival
Essayist Tālivaldis Kronbergs has published a personal reflection on Delfi about time spent with the Jesuits three decades ago and the revival of the Catholic Church in Latvia during the final years of Soviet rule.
Latvian essayist Tālivaldis Kronbergs has published a memoir-style piece on the Delfi news portal, describing two years spent with the Jesuits 30 years ago as one of the most formative periods of his life.
In the essay, Kronbergs recalls childhood trips to the Lithuanian SSR, which was officially considered a "sister republic" of Soviet Latvia but, in his personal experience, always felt like a foreign country. The family traveled by a Zhiguli car, including one trip to a market near Šiauliai to buy German-made Bosch spark plugs. He writes that beyond language, Lithuania differed from Latvia through its more visible Catholic identity, which Soviet society viewed with suspicion.
Kronbergs notes that he first encountered the word "Jesuit" not through Lithuania but through the Soviet-era Latvian film "Vella kalpi" ("Servants of the Devil") by director Aleksandrs Leimanis, which portrayed Jesuits in a caricatured, negative light. He also recalls that Vilnius's Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism was housed in the former Jesuit Church of St. Casimir, just as Riga's Dome Cathedral had been converted into a concert hall under Soviet rule. According to the essay, atheist literature remained widely available in Riga bookstores even in the late 1980s, citing as an example a book about Jesuits published in Moscow in 1989 with a print run of 100,000 copies.
The author also describes how quickly Soviet society shifted from state-promoted atheism toward religious life, pointing to a prayer service held at Riga's Dome Cathedral on October 9, 1988 in support of the Popular Front of Latvia, the first such service there in 29 years. Kronbergs himself began attending Riga's St. James Cathedral on September 1, 1988. The essay highlights three key milestones for Latvian Catholics in 1989: official Sunday school classes starting at the cathedral in January, the first issue of the revived Latvian/Latgalian-language magazine "Katōļu dzeive" appearing in spring, and Mass being celebrated in Latvian for the first time in August.
