This letter had a marked effect. The village priests everywhere refused
to say Mass according to the old ritual. But there was a section of the
people, including members of the chapter of the Minster, who shrunk from
changes in this central part of Christian worship. In deference to their
feelings, the Council resolved that the Holy Supper should be meanwhile
dispensed according to both the Reformed and the mediæval rite; in the
one celebration the cup was given to the laity, and in the other it was
withheld. No change was made in the liturgy. Then came a third
conference, and a fourth; and at last the Mass was abolished. On April
13th, 1525, the first Evangelical communion service took place in the
Great Minster, and the mediæval worship was at an end. Other changes had
been made. The monasteries had been secularised, and the monks who did
not wish to leave their calling were all gathered together in the
Franciscan convent. An amicable arrangement was come to about other
ecclesiastical foundations, and the money thus secured was mainly
devoted to education.
From 1522, Zwingli had been living in "clerical" marriage with Anna
Reinhard, the widow of a wealthy Zurich burgher. She was called his wife
by his friends, although no legal marriage ceremony had been performed.
It is perhaps difficult for us to judge the man and the times. The
so-called "clerical" marriages were universal in Switzerland. Man and
woman took each other for husband and wife, and were faithful. There was
no public ceremony. All questions of marriage, divorce, succession, and
so forth, were then adjudicated in the ecclesiastical and not in the
civil courts; and as the Canon Law had insisted that no clergyman could
marry, all such "clerical" marriages were simple concubinage in the eye
of the law, and the children were illegitimate. The offence against the
vow of chastity was condoned by a fine paid to the bishop. As early as
1523, William Röubli, a Zurich priest, went through a public form of
marriage, and his example was followed by others; but it may be
questioned whether these marriages were recognised to be legal until
Zurich passed its own laws about matrimonial cases in 1525.
Luther in his pure-hearted and solemnly sympathetic way had referred to
these clerical marriages in his _Address to the Christian Nobility of
the German Nation_ (1520).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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