Daily Archives: 10 May, 2014

1527: Johann Hüglin, Meersburg martyr

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On this date in 1527, authorities in the Swabian city of Meersburg gathered in the city marketplace in their most impressive regalia to condemn Johann Hüglin to immediate execution.

Hüglin — this link is in German, like almost everything about him that’s available online — was a priest of peasant stock.

After the 1525 Peasants War, a rebellion against authority both secular and ecclesiastic, everyone got real nervous about stirrings of rebellion. Accordingly, a divine from nearby Überlingen had several priests of suspicious heterodoxy arrested early in 1527, Hüglin among them. The other three of these soon regained their safety with a timely expression of contrite fealty. Hüglin preferred obstinacy to submission.

Charged with heresy, and with dangerously promulgating same to the simple folk in his flock in sympathy with the recent rebellion, Hüglin defended himself in terms that were becoming recognizably out of bounds — defending the primacy of the Biblical text, for instance, to uphold unwelcome doctrines like tax resistance, salvation by faith alone, and priestly marriage.

“If the Holy Scripture says nothing of Purgatory, why should I say it?” he replied when pressed on that doctrine. “Is [the torture] I have suffered not Purgatory enough?”

One hopes so, for he was condemned that same day and immediately degraded out of the clergy and relaxed to the secular authorities for immolation on a ready-built pyre, which consumed him as he sang “Gloria in Excelsis” and “Te Deum Laudamus”.

Today in Meersburg there’s a street, Johannes-Hüglin-Weg, named for this Protestant martyr.

On this day..