Villagers Cope with Religious Change, Denmark 1543-44

Villagers cope with religious change, Denmark 1543-44 Religious change often happened very quickly, and people found it difficult to give up practices they had carried out for many years. The church in Kippinge, Denmark, mentioned in the following text, had contained a chalice dedicated to St. Severin, reputed to be bleeding, which made it a popular destination for pilgrimages. The first Lutheran bishop of the Danish island of Zealand traveled widely in his diocese and wrote his experiences down in 1543-44, including stories that reveal how his audience needed to be reminded of the religious change that had been introduced in 1536 with the establishment of a Lutheran Church and state in Denmark. (Peder Palladius' Visitatsbog, ed. by Lis Jacobsen, Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1925, p. 130-31. Translated by Grethe Jacobsen and Pernille Arenfeldt)

… Another great abuse has been the visits to dead saints while forgetting the living saints … A good and honest man has become the parish minister in Holmstrup and Kippinge. Whoever arrives there in his ungodly business [i.e. to worship at the saint’s shrine] he directs back to whence he came. Flames have consumed St. Severin and his statue has been taken away. You will not find what you are looking for. Last year, in Flakkebjerg County, a woman dropped her child by accident and it broke its neck. Her husband was not home. Fearing her husband’s reaction, she took the dead child in her arms and ran to Kippinge, five miles away. As the parish minister realised that she had come as a pilgrim, he lectured to her about the proper belief and she laid her child in the cemetery and went home again. Still, I had to read her out of her belief in that and more when I visited here. Stay with your parish church and learn there what will benefit your soul and leave such ungodly ideas behind.