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 TETZEL

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TETZEL

famous oath, promptly, on the first day of the court, and the charge was, that he acted as a priest and minis- ter of the CathoUc rehgious persuasion without ha\ang first taken, subscribed, and filed the oath of loyaUy. He was arrested a few daj's afterwards, and brought into court in the custody of the sheriff on the Sth. Wlien asked to say whether he was guihy or not guilty, he declined to answer, but recited the Apostles' Creed. Hon. R. A. Campbell, subsequently heu- tenant-governor of the state, then took charge of his defence at the instance of some of Father Cummings' parishioners, and made the same defense which was afterwards successful in the Supreme Court of the United States. He was tried on the 9th, found guilty, and in default of payment of a fine of S.500, committed to jail, and placed in confinement with three persons of the most degraded tj-pe, charged with felonies. On 15 September, he gave bond, being directed to do so by Archbishop Kenrick, who caused an appeal to be- taken to the Supreme Court of Missouri. That court had been, a few months before, reorganized by militarj' force, and its bench filled with men com- mitted to upholding the oath. Father Cummings' appeal was promptly denied in the following month of October, and then his case was appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States. Pending his appeal, many priests and religious were indicted and arrested; amongst others, the saintly Bishop Hogan, of the diocese of Kansas City, Missouri, yet living at the age of 82 years, then a priest at Chil- Ucothe in Livingston County. He made the oath as odious as possible by accompanj-ing the arresting officer to the court-house, dressed in soutane, surplice, stole, and biretta, carrj'ing in his right hand a crucifix, and in his left a large Bible. He took a change of venue, gave bond, and was finally discharged by the effect of the decision in the Cummings case. In an address to some of his parishioners, referring to his arrest and the oath, he said: "The civil authority has been, ever from the days of Herod, the enemy of Christ. The question, now pending, is not one merely of loyalty or disloyalty, past, present, or prospective. The issiie is, whether the Church shall be free or not to exercise her natural and inherent right of calling into, or rejecting from, her ministry whom she pleases; or whether, j-ickhng to the dictation of the civil power, she shall admit those only, who, according to its judgment, are fit for the office."

In Cape Girardeau County, the fanatics did not stop with priests, but indicted eight Sisters of Loretto for teaching. Sisters Augusta and Margaret were arrested by the sheriff, but the others could not be found, and probably fled from their persecutors.

\\'hen the case of Father Cummings was heard in the .Supreme Court of the United States in March, lS6t5, there appeared for him, Da\'id Dudley Field, Reverdy Johnson, and Montgomery Blair, all three lawj'ers of national reputation. NotwithstancUng the sanctity of the principles involved, the Supreme Court, on 14 January', 1867, by only one majority declared the oath void, and thus relieved the priests md nuns of Mis.souri from further persecution. The effect of the decision in Father Cummings' case is best summarized by Justice Miller in his dissenting spinion in ex parte A. H. Garland (4 Wall 3:i.3) where be says of it: "In this ca.se, the Constitution of the State of Missouri, the fundamental law of the people of that state, ailopted by their popular vote, declares that no priest of any church shall exercise his minis- terial functions, unless he will show, by his own oath, that he has borne a true allegiance to his government. This court now holds this constitutional provision void on the ground that the Federal Constitution forbids it". Father Cummings' health was .seriously injured by his brutal treatment, and a few years afterwards he lost his mind, and died a martyr to the cause of cinl and rehgious liberty.

Constitution of Missouri of tsSS. Art. II, Sections 3. 6. 7. 9, 14; Afo. Sup. Ct. Reports, XXXVI-XLI, Cummings vs. MissouTi; Vol. 71 U. S. Sup. Ct. Reports, LXXI, 277.

William T. Johnson.

Tetzel, JoHANN, first pubhc antagonist of Luther, b. at Pirna in Meissen, 146.5; d. at Leipzig, U Aug., 1519. He began his studies at Leipzig during the semester of 1482-8.3; was promoted to the baccalau- reate in 1487, being the sixth in a class of fifty-six. Not long after he entered the Dominican (irdcr, whether at Pirna or Leipzig, cannot be established. Disaffection and friction having arisen in the Leipzig community, he went to Rome in 1497 to secure per- mission from Joachim Turrianus, the general of the order, to enter another monastery. In spite of a re- call of this permission, he seems to have carried his point. A few years later we find him as prior of the monastery at Glogau, which belonged to the Polish province. At the request of the Polish provincial John Advocati, he was appointed inquisitor for Po- land by the master-general, Cajetan. At this time he also received permission to take the necessary steps to have himself promoted to the doctorate of theology. His relations with the Leipzig convent must in the meantime have been frientlly again, for not only do we find him preaching a number of times in the Do- minican church at Leipzig, but after severing his rela- tions with the Polish province he was appointed in- qui-sitor of the Saxon province. The activity of his life and publicity of his office made him a well-known figure. In 1503 he made his first ajipearance as a preacher of indulgences, when the Teutonic Order of Knights in Livonia obtained permission from Alex- ander VI to have a jubilee indulgence for three years preached in the ecclesiastical provinces of iMagde- burg, Bremen, and Riga. After the lapse of three years Julius II (22 Nov., 1506) granted a new indul- gence for tliree additional years in the provinces of Cologne, Mainz, and Trier. At the end of 1509 he was indulgence commissary at .Str.asburg, and from here in 1510 he went to Nuremberg, Wtirzburg, and Bamberg.

From July, 1510, to April, 1516, all traces of him were lost. It was his appearance as an indulgence preacher in 1516, to aid the constiiiction of St. Peter's at Rome (see Luther, vol. IX, 441), that thrust him into an undue prominence, invested him with an exag- gerated importance, and branded him with an im- merited odium that only the most painstaking critical research is now slowly lifting. It was while preach- ing at Jiiterbog, a small town outside of Saxony, not far from Wittenberg (where the indulgences were not allowed to be preached), that Luther in one of his most violent philippics in 1541 relates "many people of Wittenberg flocked after indulgences to Jiiterbog" (Wider Hans Worst in "Sammtl. W.", XXVI, .50- .53), and then after much hesitation nailed the ninety- five theses on indulgences on the castle church door at Wittenberg, 31 Oct., 1517. That this preaching of the indulgences was not the primary and immediate cause that precipitated the promulgation of Luther's ninety-five theses may be inferred not only from hia subsequent course but also from the fact that the "Annales" of Jiiterbog (Hechtius, "Vita .Jo.annis Te- zelii", Wittenberg, 1717, .53 sq.) prove that Tetzel preached there .as early as 10 April; that Luther in his letter to Archbishop Albrccht (Oct. 31, 1517) admits that he entertained the thought for a long time to preach against indulgence .abuses (Enders, "Dr. Mar- tin Luther's Brief wechsel", I, Fr.ankfort, 1884, 115); that Tetzel for several weeks had already been in the district of Brandenburg (Paulus, "Johann Tetzel", Mainz, 1899, 47).

The theses dispute between Luther and Tetzel, is handled so circumstantially in a preceding volume of The Catholic Encyclopedia (IX. 441-442) that we need not repeat it here. The publication of Luther's "Sermon on Indulgences and Grace" was replied to