They did not wait for Rome

Einsiedeln, 1526. The story of a rebirth that did not start with those in charge.

The man who can no longer go on

Einsiedeln, 20 July 1526. In the abbey residence of the monastery, an old man lays down his office. Konrad von Hohenrechberg is 86 years old. For 46 years he has headed the abbey, one of the most important pilgrimage sites north of the Alps. The monastery’s profession book records the act dryly: the abbot renounces the abbey because of his advanced age, into the hands of the Landammann and council of Schwyz.

One should not judge this man too quickly. Konrad carried the place through difficult decades. He lived through a fire, departures, upheavals, the slow dwindling of his community. He is not a culprit and not a failure. He is a human being whose strength is running out. That happens. It happens to abbots; it happens to anyone who carries responsibility long enough.

The real problem begins only with his resignation. Because behind Konrad almost no one remains. At this point the monastic community of Einsiedeln has practically shrunk to a single monk: the 86-year-old abbot himself. If he goes, the monastery goes.

Who takes responsibility when the person who holds it by office can no longer carry it?

On that July day, no one has an answer.

A monastery does not die in a day

To understand how it came to this, one must go back a few decades. Einsiedeln was a noble monastery. Anyone who wanted to become a monk here had to be of noble birth. The profession book describes a convent of nobles closely related to one another. That rule had once been part of the house’s identity. It tied the monastery to the powerful families of the region; it secured property, relationships and rank.

The same rule became a bottleneck. The circle of families from which recruits could come was small. It grew smaller. When the convent elected Konrad abbot in 1480, it still numbered three voters, among them the humanist Albrecht von Bonstetten. Then they died, one after another: Barnabas von Mosax in 1501, Bonstetten a few years later. Hardly anyone followed, because the permitted circle of families produced barely any more sons. A rule that once meant strength now quietly contributed to weakness. No one had enacted it maliciously. No one repealed it.

Then came the blows from outside. In March 1509 fire broke out in Einsiedeln. The blaze laid parts of the village and the monastery in ashes, including the minster. Rebuilding tied up strength and money for years.

From the outside the place still stood: the pilgrimage, the Chapel of Grace, the name that resonated across half of Europe. Inside it grew empty. Both were true at once, and that is exactly what made the situation so hard to see. A place can shine and die at the same time.

Then the world shifts

In 1516 a young priest from Glarus arrives in Einsiedeln. Diebold von Geroldseck, since 1513 steward of the monastery and in practice the man running day-to-day affairs, transfers to him on 14 April 1516 the parish post – that is, pastoral care for pilgrims and the village. The priest’s name is Huldrych Zwingli.

At this point Zwingli is not yet a Reformer. He is an educated pastor, shaped by humanism, in exchange with Erasmus of Rotterdam. But he stands for something larger than himself: for a world that is beginning to test old certainties. Geroldseck opens himself to these thoughts. The two men read, discuss, think. Einsiedeln, of all places – the great pilgrimage site – becomes for two years a place of new thinking.

In 1518 Zwingli moves on, to the Grossmünster in Zurich. What he sets in motion there is in every history book: the Reformation takes Zurich, then large parts of the Confederation. Images disappear from churches, authorities dissolve monasteries, the pilgrimage itself comes under pressure to justify its existence. Precisely now, when Einsiedeln has barely any substance left inside, the outside world asks what this place is still for.

That is the most dangerous constellation an institution can face: Inside, the capacity to renew itself runs dry. Outside, the world that once carried the place shifts. Either development alone would have been bearable. Together they became existential.

Then the people leave too

In 1525 Diebold von Geroldseck leaves Einsiedeln. The man who for twelve years carried the actual leadership is inclined toward Zwingli’s teaching and has fallen out with the people of Schwyz over it. He will later live in Zurich and die in 1531 at the Battle of Kappel, at Zwingli’s side.

For Einsiedeln his departure means more than the loss of a person. The hand that held the operation together is gone. What remains is what had long stood on paper and now becomes visible in daily life: a centuries-old institution, a place known across Europe, vast holdings.

And as a monastic community: one man of 86.

The vacuum

Back to the summer of 1526. Konrad can no longer go on. On 20 July he resigns.

Hold this emptiness for a moment without jumping to the solution. A monastery without a convent cannot elect an abbot, because the election belongs to the convent. The church order that would be responsible for such cases is occupied with itself: Rome is wrestling with the Reformation, with the politics of the powers, with its own finances. From there comes no initiative. The order that ought to save the place produces no rescue.

In such moments there is an obvious posture: wait. Someone is in charge, after all. Some authority will respond. The temptation to find peace in that thought is great. Being in charge feels like an answer. It is only an address. That is how places die. Not by a resolution, but by the sum of everyone who, by virtue of their office, does nothing.

In Einsiedeln it went differently. And from a side from which no one could have demanded it.

The people of Schwyz seize the initiative

The Landammann and council of Schwyz – the political leadership of a peasant commonwealth – take the matter into their own hands. Not Rome. No cardinal, no bishop. A council of farmers and country people attends to the succession in one of Europe’s best-known abbeys. Men who have spent their lives managing cattle, commons and boundary stones now negotiate the future of a place whose name is known in Rome.

They do not do this only in July. As early as 20 January 1526 they appointed Martin von Kriens as secular steward, so that at least the administration of the house of God would continue. They had therefore acted months before Konrad’s resignation, when the problem was foreseeable but not yet official. Anyone who reads the calendar can see: The resignation of 20 July did not surprise them. They were prepared.

One must not cast the people of Schwyz as heroes without self-interest. They were protectors of the monastery, and protection was never pure care. The place meant influence. The pilgrimage brought people and money into their landscape. At a time when Zurich was leaving the old faith, a living Einsiedeln was also a political signal. Religious conviction, interest in power, economic calculation: it was probably some of everything; the sources allow no look into their minds.

But the actions are recorded, and they speak clearly. The people of Schwyz did not hold the canon-law mandate to appoint an abbot. They did it anyway. Their bailiff turned to the abbot of St. Gallen with the request to release one of his monks for Einsiedeln. The St. Gallen abbot hesitated; canonically it made him uneasy. The people of Schwyz kept at it.

The one sentence on which this story turns stands exactly here: They are looking for an abbot for a monastery that practically has no monks left.

Read the sentence twice, calmly. By any sober logic it is absurd. An abbot is the head of a community. The community no longer exists. Anyone who still looks for an abbot is not seeing the monastery that is. He is seeing the monastery that could be again. There is no other way to explain this search.

14 August 1526

Ludwig Blarer von Wartensee, monk and dean of the monastery of St. Gallen, comes to Einsiedeln. On 14 August 1526, on the eve of the Assumption of Mary, the great feast of the place, the people of Schwyz install him as abbot.

It is worth not making this day larger than it was. On the evening of 14 August 1526 there is no revived community. There is no convent surrounding its new abbot. There is no guarantee that one will ever arise again. The canonical situation is unresolved: papal confirmation by Clement VII will arrive only on 26 April 1533, almost seven years later. For seven years Blarer holds an office that its highest authority has not yet recognized.

And yet, on that evening something is different from the morning of 20 July. There is again a person who can get up the next day to build this place. That is all it is. And it is no less.

Konrad von Hohenrechberg dies a good two weeks later, on 1 September 1526. He lived to see his successor.

A better place costs something

If this were an anecdote for Sunday speeches, it would end here: with the image of the new abbot on the eve of the feast. Reality was tougher, and that toughness belongs to the story.

The people of Schwyz themselves did not treat their commitment as a gift. They had the new abbot promise to render accounts at any time and not to alienate any monastery property without their permission. Anyone who demands that is not giving something away. He is investing and securing his investment.

Blarer, for his part, faced a task for which there was no blueprint. He had to win new monks for a house with an uncertain future, in the middle of a time when monasteries were collapsing all around. The old rule of admitting only nobles had to fall – the very rule that had helped cause the decline. Only in 1535, nine years after that August, did Blarer accept two novices of bourgeois origin. Nine years until the first visible new blood. Recognition from Rome he likewise had to earn over years, while outside the religious conflict continued and in 1531 at Kappel even turned into battle.

Here one sees what imagination achieves and what it does not. A better place does not arise because someone can imagine it. The image saves nothing by its own power. But it makes decisions possible that look unreasonable from the status quo: appointing an abbot without a convent, overturning an identity rule, waiting nine years for the first novice without giving up. Anyone who sees only the as-is state makes none of these decisions. Each one would have looked like waste to him.

500 years later

Today is 14 August 2026. Exactly 500 years have passed since that installation. Einsiedeln Abbey lives. Monks pray, work, receive pilgrims. This year the house marks a jubilee that recalls precisely this turning point of 1526.

500 years are not pathos; they are a measurement. No one on 14 August 1526 could know what we know today. There was no reliable plan for five centuries, not even for five years. At the beginning there were only people who did not want a living place to die. And who were ready to draw consequences from that image: money, obligations, conflict with the responsible order, patience over years.

Those in charge simply watched the decline. Those who took responsibility saved the place. The difference between the two stood in no directory of offices.

Perhaps for you it is not a monastery

Perhaps it is a company. A business unit the headquarters only still administers. A product everyone still praises and no one develops further. A platform no one invests in any more. A team losing its best people, one after another. A transformation that ran out of strength halfway, and whose leader, like Konrad, simply can no longer go on.

Perhaps you are not even in charge. On the org chart stands another name, another department, a committee. Perhaps that is why you wait. Just as all of Europe could have waited for Rome to concern itself with an empty monastery in the mountains of Schwyz.

But perhaps you are like the people of Schwyz that winter, when months before the official end they appointed a steward: you already see something others do not yet see. Not the place’s present state, but what it could be again. The first step of the people of Schwyz was not the appointment of an abbot. It was an administrator in January, so that the bills would keep running. That unspectacular is how a beginning may look. Once that image is there, the question of who is in charge becomes another question – a more uncomfortable one.

The people of Schwyz did not ask whether it was their turn. They asked whether the place should live – and drew consequences from the answer.

Where are you still waiting for the person in charge to act, even though you have long seen what the place could become?