Ēriks Mesters (20 December 1926 – 8 November 2009) was a Latvian theologian and archbishop of the

Evangelical Lutheran Church of Latvia The Evangelical Lutheran Church of Latvia ( lv, Latvijas Evaņģēliski luteriskā baznīca, or LELB) is a Lutheran Protestant church in Latvia. Latvia's Lutheran heritage dates back to the Reformation. Both the Nazi and communist regimes pers ...

and Archbishop of Riga from 1986 to 1989.

Biography

Ēriks Mesters was a soldier of the Red Army during WWII. Between 1956 and 1959 he worked as a consultant for the National Economic Council of the

Latvian SSR The Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic (Latvian SSR), also known as Soviet Latvia or simply Latvia, was a federated republic within the Soviet Union, and formally one of its 16 (later 15) constituent republics. The Latvian Soviet Socialist Rep ...

. From 1960 to 1967 he studied theology at the seminary of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Latvia in

Riga Riga (; lv, Rīga , liv, Rīgõ) is the capital and largest city of Latvia and is home to 605,802 inhabitants which is a third of Latvia's population. The city lies on the Gulf of Riga at the mouth of the Daugava river where it meets the B ...

. On 8 June 1969 he was ordained a priest in Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, Riga, to which he had been a vicar since 1968. From 1969 to 1986 he was pastor of Holy Trinity Church and from 1972 to 1986 also of the parish of

Dalbe Dalbe is a village in Cena Parish, Jelgava Municipality in the Semigallia region of Latvia. The village located at Misa river approximately 28 km from the capital Riga and 14 km from the city A city is a human settlement of ...

. From 1980 he was a member of the Consistory of the Latvian Church. Mesters was elected archbishop of Riga on 15 April 1986 during the extraordinary synod of the Latvian Evangelical Lutheran Church. He thus succeeded Jānis Matulis, who died in August 1985. On 24 August he was consecrated by Olof Sundby Archbishop emeritus of

Uppsala Uppsala (, or all ending in , ; archaically spelled ''Upsala'') is the county seat of Uppsala County and the List of urban areas in Sweden by population, fourth-largest city in Sweden, after Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmö. It had 177,074 inha ...

in St. Gertrude New Church, Riga. From 1986 to 1989, Mesters taught ethics at the theological seminary in Riga. Ēriks Mesters was known as a supporter of the existing Soviet order. In the turbulent eighties in the Baltic states, when young people from the three countries in particular called for independence, Mesters supported the Soviet government. Within the Consistory (administration) of the Latvian Church his attitude was not undisputed and this probably led to his retirement in 1989. In 2005 a book about the history of the Latvian Church was published. In the years before he wrote some biographies of Lutheran archbishops. Mesters died at the age of 82 on 8 November 2009 in

."Sēru vēsts. +Ēriks Mesters, arhibīskaps emeritus"
''

'', Riga. Retrieved on 17 December 2017.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Mesters, Eriks 1926 births 2009 deaths People from Jelgava Latvian Lutheran bishops Latvian Lutheran clergy Latvian bishops Lutheran archbishops of Riga 20th-century Lutheran archbishops