Page 153 - Upland Families, Elites and Communities

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Catholic Confraternities, Kinship and Social

Discipline: An Inquiry into Eighteenth
and Nineteenth Century Swiss Alpine

Parishes (1720–1850)

Sandro Guzzi-Heeb
University of Lausanne, Switzerland

© 2025 Sandro Guzzi-Heeb
https://doi.org/10.26493/978-961-293-486-6.151-174

Introduction: Religion and Social Discipline
There is little doubt that at the time of the Council of Trent the revival
of the confraternities had been conceived as one of the instruments for
ensuring the spread of the Catholic faith and the loyalty of the people to
the Church of the Counter-Reformation (Froeschlé-Chopard 2006; Domp-
nier and Vismara 2008; Pastore et al. 2011; Adamoli 2015; Torre 2007). It
can therefore be hypothesized that Catholic women and men, through the
confraternities, ensured a certain degree of political and social discipline
within their community. One of the statutes of the Confraternity of the
Blessed Sacrament of Liddes, written in the first half of the eighteenth
century, read: ‘No one may be admitted to this confraternity if he has been
found guilty of any vice or any notable and scandalous crime, nor with-
out the consent of the rector, prior, sub-prior, and counsellors, who shall
be responsible according to the law’ (mgsb, apl, f9, 2, Statutes and ac-
counts of the Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament, Register 1741–1771).
In general, the members vowed to lead a pious life and to avoid sin. This
was by no means a specific character of Alpine confraternities; historians
have identified similar documents and comparable goals in confraternities
throughout Europe (Rosser 2019). This pious ideal certainly applied to dif-
ferent aspects of daily life, especially to sexual behaviour; but how far was
this ideal achieved in reality?
We have clear evidence that the clergy tried to ensure a certain degree
of discipline among their parishioners throughout the eighteenth century,

Panjek,A.,ed.2025. Upland Families, Elites and Communities: Long-Run Micro
Perspectives on Persistence and Change. University of Primorska Press.