Ulrich Zwingli

Ulrich Zwingli was a Swiss reformer that lived and tried to reform the Catholic church at the same time as the more famous Martin Luther. He was born in 1484, born into the family of free peasants, which meant they were the closest thing to a middle class in olden times. He went to a good school that taught him Latin, and much about the bible and theology. He came close to becoming a Dominican monk, but decided against it. He became a priest a few years later and went back to his hometown in 1506. He was then ordered to leave, however, and went to a town called Glarus, where he spent ten years of his life. Switzerland was not at peace with any of it’s neighbors, however, and so Ulrich decided to become a chaplain, or a priest for the soldiers. This didn’t last long, though, because he quickly came to believe that war, military, and mercenaries were all immoral, so he was actually fired from the job after trying to get soldiers to quit. He then spent some time working on self improvement, and in 1523, six years after Martin Luther published his 95 Thesis, Zwingli posted his 67 Artikel, or 67 Articles. These were all of the problems that he saw in the Catholic church, and he thought they could be fixed using his articles. Among these articles were his ideas that: images and pictures should be removed from churches and prayer, priests should be able to marry, mass should be replaced by community talks, and organs should not be used as much. These are only four, and they don’t seem very strange since they are in affect today, but back then these were radical and mind blowing changes, but he managed to get a rather large following, since Martin Luther had already softened peoples minds to the point where they wouldn’t shout “No!” and slam the door. He based all of his changes on the bible, however, and the Catholic church never provided a proper argument and thus, we have his changes in today’s church.

Another group broke off of his, specifically because they thought he was not really attempting to get his reforms to work, and they thought he wasn’t being radical enough. These people that were considered crazy by the people that were considered crazy by the normal people were called Anabaptists, because their most famous crazy idea was that a person should not be baptized until they have sworn faith to god on their own, while everyone else just baptized babies. We do still have pockets of this group in the Amish and Mennonites, but these people are not nearly as plentiful as Zwingli’s.