Zwingli, Huldrych ........................... Z
(1484–1531)
Swiss church reformer, a contemporary of
Martin Luther who established the Re-
formed branch of the Protestant move-
ment. The son of a village magistrate,
Zwingli was born in the village of
Wildhaus in eastern Switzerland. He re-
ceived an education in the classics at the
universities of Basel and Vienna, and was
ordained as a priest in 1506, when he be-
came pastor of the town of Glarus. He
served as a chaplain to Swiss mercenaries
in Italy and in 1516 became vicar of Ein-
siedeln, an important Benedictine monas-
tery where a large library gave Zwingli op-
portunity for study and research. Soon
after this appointment he began preaching
reform of the Catholic Church. Zwingli
found no foundation for the Papacy in the
books of the Bible and increasingly viewed
the Catholic Church as a corrupt and
decadent institution.
In 1519 Zwingli was appointed vicar
to the Grossmunster church in Zurich.
Having studied the New Testament trans-
lation of Desiderius Erasmus, he devel-
oped his own reformist doctrine, and be-
gan preaching criticisms of important
Catholic institutions, such as monasticism
and the selling of indulgences (remissions
of sin). He saw the Catholic Mass as a pa-
gan blasphemy on true Christianity; he re-
jected the notion of purgatory, the venera-
tion of saints, the practice of fasting during
Lent, and the Catholic stricture of priestly
celibacy. In 1522, he declared that the
Bible, and not the church, provided the
authority for all questions of Christian
doctrine. Many priests of the city took up
his cause, which he set out in the Sixty-
Seven Articles in 1523. After witnessing a
public debate between Zwingli and a rep-
resentative of the pope, the city fathers
followed his reforming impulse, ordering
all priests in the city to comply with
Zwingli’s instruction and in 1524 remov-
ing the statues, relics, musical instruments,
and works of art that were now deemed
idolatrous from the city’s churches. In the
next year Zwingli published his major
written work,The Commentary on True
and False Religion.
Zwingli believed, like Martin Luther, in
the key Protestant doctrine of justification
by faith alone. But he differed with Luther
in the question of the presence of Christ
in the bread and wine of Mass—with
Luther holding that Christ is actually
present, and Zwingli that the bread and
wine are only symbolic representations of
Christ’s body and blood. The two reform-
ers debated the question at the famous
Marburg Colloquy of 1529. The disagree-
ment created a rift in the Protestant move-
ment between Lutheranism and Zwingli’s
Reformed branch.
In Zurich, the more radical branch of
Anabaptists emerged to challenge Zwingli’s
authority, while the “forest cantons” of
Switzerland that remained loyal to the
Catholic Church took up arms against the
Protestants. In 1531 Zwingli was mortally
wounded at the Battle of Kappel. His body