The Jetzer affair: staged apparitions in Bern's Dominican friary

Bern, 1506. Hans Jetzer, born around 1483 in Zurzach, was an illiterate tailor's assistant. At about 23 he became a lay brother in the city's Dominican friary. Its church survives today as the French Church. His order was locked in a fight with the Franciscans over the Immaculate Conception, the belief that Mary was born without sin. The Dominicans rejected it.

It began with a ghost. A spirit appeared in Jetzer's cell. It said it was a former prior, dismissed 160 years earlier, who had died in a brawl in Paris. It was in purgatory, it said, with Franciscans punished for preaching the Immaculate Conception. A 1509 woodcut by Urs Graf shows its hand at Jetzer's throat.

24 March 1507. The Feast of the Annunciation. The Virgin Mary came with St Barbara, the saint Jetzer was devoted to. Mary gave him reliquaries and marked the first stigma on his right hand. Four more wounds, she promised, would come within six weeks. St Cecilia, Catherine of Siena and Bernard of Clairvaux visited too.

In mid-April a white communion wafer in Mary's hand turned red. In early May the other wounds appeared. Each day at midday Jetzer re-enacted Christ's Passion. "The whole city came to see."

The night of 24 to 25 June. A statue of Mary holding her dead son wept tears of blood. Jesus was heard to ask why she wept. She grieved, she answered, at being called born without sin. That honour belonged to her son alone. Crowds came. Handkerchiefs soaked in the blood were sold.

At the end of July the stigmata vanished overnight, just after the Bishop of Lausanne announced that a doctor would examine them. On 29 July the wafer fell and broke onto a chair, leaving a red mark. When the friars tried to burn the chair, "It is said that the stove and the whole room exploded." Then, on 12 September, a crowned Virgin appeared above the rood screen. Jetzer had overheard the plan. He went at her with a staff and a knife, and was stopped before he could unmask her.

On 1 October 1507 Bern's Small Council had Jetzer arrested. Bishop Aymon de Montfalcon of Lausanne refused to torture him. Back in Bern, early in February 1508, he was tortured, and he accused his four superiors. Before Montfalcon and Matthäus Schiner of Sion, the friars were tortured in turn. Their accounts matched. Prior Johann Vatter and subprior Franz Ueltschi had played angels. Lector Stephan Boltzhurst had played Mary. They stood "on a movable beam operated from a neighboring cell", worked by the steward Heinrich Steinegger.

On 23 May 1509, after a retrial approved by Pope Julius II, the four were defrocked. On 31 May 1509 they were burned alive on the Schwellenmatte. Jetzer was banished for life. He escaped prison, married, went back to tailoring and died around 1514 or 1515.

Nikolaus Paulus called the verdict a judicial murder by Bern. Rudolf Steck also saw a judicial murder, but blamed the Pope. Others cast Jetzer himself as the impostor. Kathrin Utz Tremp, in her 2022 study, sees him mainly as a victim. The theology was beyond him, and the miracles echo Bernardino de' Busti's Mariale, a book he probably never read.

In 1509 Thomas Murner and others printed pamphlets about the case. Diebold Schilling the Younger illustrated the scenes in his chronicle of 1513. Reformed writers made the affair a symbol of monastic corruption. Its memory probably influenced Bern's adoption of the Reformation in 1528, though no direct link can be shown.