A Zwingli factoid in honor of Jim West

I’ve been asked to say something evil about Zwingli by Jim Getz. That’s harder for me to accomplish than one might think. Two Waldensian friends, Emidio Campi and Fulvio Ferrario, are top-notch Zwingli scholars. I have no intention of getting in their bad graces.

But here’s a tidbit from Zwingli’s youth, before he became a Reformer. It’s a fine example of how an old boys network worked back then:

In late 1518, the post of secular priest of the Grossmünster church in Zürich became vacant. Zwingli applied for the vacancy at the invitation of Oswald Myconius (a friend of his youth), a teacher in the monastery school of that place. Like many other clerics, Zwingli was suspected of offenses against celibacy. These reports, which were current even in Zürich, made his position there difficult. When his friend Myconius questioned him on this point Zwingli wrote from Einsiedeln that it was not, as had been asserted, a respectable girl, but a common strumpet with whom he had been intimate. His friends in Zürich succeeded in suppressing these reports, and on December 11, 1518, the chapter elected Zwingli by a great  majority. He was then thirty-five years old, "in body a handsome and vigorous person, fairly tall, and of a friendly aspect." (Slightly adapted from the Catholic Encyclopedia)

A few years later, Zwingli would marry Anna Reinhart. Here is her story.

Comments

"A common strumptet"

Oh, well that's alright then...

[Peter Kirk]

Reminds me of the way in which homosexuals are currently being ordained etc in Anglican (and no doubt other) churches, when everyone "knows" they are practising gays but officially they deny it.

If Zwingli was indeed "in body a handsome and vigorous person", then he was badly served by his portrait painters.

[JohnFH]

The issues of which you speak, Peter, have faced the church since the beginning. There were times in centuries past in Sicily, for example, in which a priest was not accepted unless it was known he did have a steady concubine. Otherwise, it was assumed, he was one step away from preying on their daughters.

"Don't ask, don't tell" policies, in any case, are inherently unstable.

In the ecclesiastical setting in which I serve, the rules right now are very strict. A pastor who gets involved with a parishioner, even if both are single, is disciplined immediately, transferred, and on some occasions, forced to relinquish his or her credentials.

That is pretty much how it works, or is supposed to work, in academia as well.

[tim bulkeley]

But was Anna the said "common strumpet" or was Z also being unfaithful?

[JohnFH]

Hi Tim. No, Anna was not in the picture yet. After the events recounted in this post, while in Zurich, Zwingli met Anna, a widow with three children. That's a whole 'nother story. He lived with her secretly for two years, and married her in 1524.

The Romanists and the Anabaptists accused Zwingli of marrying Anna for her beauty and her money. It is said that he replied by saying she was not worth more than 400 guilders. I suppose that was one way of saying that he did admire her beauty.

[Jim]

Well it's not exactly news. But I appreciate the effort anyway.

[JohnFH]

It's not news to Zwingli buffs. But it is to everyone else.