The Reformation in Switzerland started quietly. On the night of 9 March 1522, the primary Sunday in Lent, what one historian has referred to as ‘the ostentatious consuming of sausages’ passed off within the parlour of Zurich printer Christoph Froschauer.
It was a provocative act, in breach of church guidelines on fasting. Twelve folks have been current. Some later grew to become Anabaptists; one, a bootmaker named Hottinger, could be beheaded in Baden two years later for difficult the Mass.
Additionally current was Ulrich Zwingli, a canon on the metropolis’s Grossmünster. Zwingli had been radicalised by Erasmus, however he went additional than his grasp. For Erasmus, folks ought to obey fasting guidelines till they have been abolished by the church; for Zwingli, the church had no proper to set such guidelines within the first place. It was unbiblical.
Rebel was contagious: on Palm Sunday, Zwingli heard, some monks ate a suckling pig in Basel. In direction of the tip of the month he delivered a sermon titled ‘Concerning the Selection and Freedom of Meals’. Some Lenten laws, he famous, have been comparatively current. If it was such a sin to have eggs on quick days, why had it taken the church 14 centuries to behave? Froschauer put the sermon into print.
After Easter, Zwingli attacked clerical celibacy. This, a minimum of, was private: he was already secretly married.
