The Reformation in Switzerland began quietly. On the evening of 9 March 1522, the first Sunday in Lent, what one historian has called ‘the ostentatious eating of sausages’ took place in the parlour of Zurich printer Christoph Froschauer.
It was a provocative act, in breach of church rules on fasting. Twelve people were present. Some later became Anabaptists; one, a bootmaker named Hottinger, would be beheaded in Baden two years later for challenging the Mass.
Also present was Ulrich Zwingli, a canon at the city’s Grossmünster. Zwingli had been radicalised by Erasmus, but he went further than his master. For Erasmus, people should obey fasting rules until they were abolished by the church; for Zwingli, the church had no right to set such rules in the first place. It was unbiblical.
Rebellion was contagious: on Palm Sunday, Zwingli heard, some priests ate a suckling pig in Basel. Towards the end of the month he delivered a sermon titled ‘Regarding the Choice and Freedom of Foods’. Some Lenten regulations, he noted, were relatively recent. If it was such a sin to have eggs on fast days, why had it taken the church 14 centuries to act? Froschauer put the sermon into print.
After Easter, Zwingli attacked clerical celibacy. This, at least, was personal: he was already secretly married.