Page 161 - Upland Families, Elites and Communities

Catholic Confraternities, Kinship and Social Discipline

to the presbytery. The overwhelming opposition against the priest in 1790
forced him to leave the parish and continue his career in Martigny, where
he was made prior in 1791.
Murith wasprobablyabletotakesomecomfort fromthefactthat, one
year on from the French Revolution, these remained difficult times. More-
over, he was not the first parish priest to have been driven out of his parish.
His predecessor, Jean-Jérôme Darbellay, had also been removed from Lid-
des in 1769, following tensions not justwiththe community butalsowith
the Maison du Grand-Saint-Bernard, which held the collation rights and
ecclesiastical fees in the Valais region of Entremont. A few years earlier an-
other parish priest with a strong personality, Jean-Maurice Clément, had
been removed from the Valais parish of Mase, after many years of con-
flict with his parishioners. As already mentioned, Murith’s curate at Lid-
des, Nicolas Cavé, was to leave the parish of Bovernier temporarily in 1806,
after a long conflict with the communal council.
What was the role of local confraternities in these struggles? Did the
men who fought against the parsons belong to the devotional societies, or
were they beyond the scope of the clerical organizations? This question is
crucial from the perspective of the implementation of a political and social
discipline by the Church and by its most popular associations.
During the hot phase of political conflicts in the mid-nineteenth century
the situation is fairly clear. It is hardly surprising to find that at this stage
the radical activists of the Young Switzerland association were no longer
members of the local brotherhoods. Nineteenth century devotional asso-
ciations, therefore, did not play just a purely symbolic role: to a certain
extent they channelled specific values and identities and exerted a certain
degree of ideological control over their members.
In late eighteenth century Liddes, the fronts are less clear-cut, and the
boundaries between Church followers and adversaries are blurred. We do
not know all the names of Murith´s adversaries in 1790, but it is clear that
at the climax of the revolt he was by no means defended by the influential
confraternities of the village or by their leaders. In an anonymous memo-
randum submitted to the diocesan court the parishioners presented vari-
ous grievances against their parson. They wondered, among several points
of concern: ‘If Mr Murith has not outraged the parish for a long time by
keeping women from Berne in his home, causing great scandal not only in
this parish but in the neighbouring parishes too, by allowing them to at-
tend the divine offices with the utmost irreverence [...] during Mass and
during the adoration of the Blessed Sacrament itself; (2) If he did not often

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