Pierre Tobie Yenni

Pierre Tobie Yenni, contemporary portrait

Marie Pierre Tobie Yenni (born December 27, 1774 in Morlon , † December 8, 1845 in Freiburg im Üechtland ) was Bishop of Lausanne-Geneva .

Life

Pierre Tobie Yenni came from an old Gruyère family that can be traced back to Morlon in the 17th century: his ancestor Jehan Jany had all of his possessions certified in Morlon on June 16, 1612. Since then the name has been spelled in various ways, including 1671 Jenny, 1678 Jeani, 1790 Jenni and 1802 Yenni.

His father was the small farmer Christophe Jeani, married to Marie-Elisabeth, geb. Verdun. In 1776 his brother Maurice was born, who later took over his father's farm.

In 1781 he was placed in the care of his uncle Charles-Joseph Yenni († 1821), pastor in Vuippens , who taught and educated him for the next six years. Because his uncle had already taught him the Latin language, he was able to enter the second class of the St. Michael College in Freiburg in 1787 , which was under the direction of ex-Jesuit Pierre Joseph Gauthier de Schaller (1730-1819). When he graduated from high school, he received the 2nd progress award, a holdover from the former Jesuit school. In autumn 1790 he moved to the Athenaeum (a type of academy where poetry and rhetoric was taught) and began studying theology at the University of Freiburg in November 1792 .

In the summer of 1793 he had the opportunity to continue his studies at the Collegium Germanicum in Rome , because at the request of the Bishop of Lausanne, Bernhard Emmanuel von Lenzburg (1723–1795), the diocese was granted two free places after Pope Pius VI. also allowed Swiss people to study there. After receiving the minor orders on September 21, 1793 in the Church of Our Lady in Freiburg , he left his home village on September 30, 1793 and arrived in Rome on April 23. He began his theology and philosophy studies under the direction of Giovanni Castiglioni, who presided over the college. During his studies he was appointed novice master and after receiving the subdiaconate and diaconate ordination he completed his studies in spring 1797 as Dr. theol. phil. and returned to Freiburg as a Roman doctor .

Before he reached canonical age , he was ordained priest on September 23, 1797 from the hands of Jean-Baptiste d'Odet in the collegiate church . He then spent two and a half years in Freiburg as a preceptor in the family of the later mayor Philippe de Gottrau de la Riedera (1757–1836) and raised his two sons Tobie and Charles, who also attended the college as students; at the same time he was from 1799 pastor in the parish of Ependes .

After the French army marched into Switzerland, the order of the estates collapsed and Pierre Tobie Yenni looked around for a solid livelihood. At the episcopal presentation, he was appointed pastor of Praroman by the Helvetic Administrative Chamber of the Canton of Friborg on March 6, 1800 , and the canonical installation took place on the same day; up to now, the Freiburg Minor Council had the right of collature over these benefices , but due to a director's decision in 1798 all rights in this regard were transferred to the cantonal administrative chambers. Pierre Tobi Yenni developed a lively pastoral activity and in 1808 carried out a popular mission among his parishioners . His further work was increasingly determined by the action program of the priestly association Correspondance ecclésiastique .

Activity in the priestly association Correspondance ecclésiastique

At the beginning of the 19th century, three groups of intellectual and political currents emerged in Freiburg: The first was the church-conservative camp, which was almost exclusively recruited from the majority of the clergy and the rural population. With few exceptions, this tendency was anti- Helvetic , that is, counter-revolutionary, and rejected everything that suggested the godless revolution . These included above all the old-minded patricians , headed by Philippe de Gottrau de la Riedera. These were also called the well- intentioned , who were anxious to consolidate the authority appointed by God , and who saw in their opponents the bad guys , innovators and philosophers of the day .

The enlightened and free-thinking aristocrats stood out from this conservative camp ; They were also reactionary and in 1814, together with the old-minded patriciate, created the restoration constitution , which not a single federal state knew about in this pronounced form. Culturally, however, they were progressive and liberal. Its leading politician was Jean de Montenach .

This politically reactionary front was opposed to the actually liberal-democratic freedom movement of the citizens in the capital and in the two country towns of Bulle and Murten .

During this time, the Correspondance ecclésiastique was founded in 1810 , an association of priests with the aim of raising the theological, pastoral and cultural level of education of the diocesan clergy, because in March 1798 the French invaders forced the closure of the seminary at the College of St. Michael that had been established three years earlier so that the theological education system in Freiburg was down until 1807, when theological education was resumed in the college.

The external reason for founding the priests' association was the rebuke of Bishop Jean-Baptiste d'Odet, who accused the diocesan clergy of being limited and indolent . The Correspondance ecclésiastique strove for the scientific-theological as well as the practical-pastoral training of the secular clergy; however, certain side effects of this organization seem strange.

The priests' association presented itself to the outside world as an exclusive secret society, in which the members adopted an alias from the Old Testament and communicated with signature codes, obfuscation lists and numeric alphabets, so that the true meaning of important documents could not be revealed to the uninitiated. Only the bishop was aware of the union; all other non-corresponding clergy had to be kept secret even the existence of the movement and all members were obliged to the strictest secrecy. The priestly association was also referred to by its opponents as the Petite Église , which had formed in France , but the two associations were not related to each other. The members of the Freiburg Priests' Association later called their association Grande Association or Association ecclésiastique .

The term Correspondance ecclésiastique is most appropriate insofar as the lessons were carried out by correspondence, with the individual tracts being sent to the members from a secretariat, with each correspondent having to take a position on the questions and problems raised. The initiators of the association were Jean-Joseph Dey (1778–1863), later professor of church history and Bible exegesis at the College of St. Michael, and dean Joseph Aebischer (1787–1852), later pastor of the Catholic parish of Neuchâtel . They wanted to return to the old order and strengthen their belief in God's will of dependence . Resistance to the Catholic Enlightenment was also made part of the program. With this attitude they believed they could stem the all-destructive flood of innovations .

Pierre Tobie Yenni first joined the Société économique , which was founded in 1813 based on the model of the Swiss Charitable Society . But as soon as the heads of the liberal patriciate gained dominant influence in it, he withdrew from it and felt more at home in the spiritual home of the Correspondance ecclésiastique . He was admitted to the association in 1914 under the code name Phineas and after a short time proposed that the statutes of the priestly association be submitted to the Holy See . In addition to theological and cultural further education, he wanted from the beginning to help the spiritual renewal among the clergy to break through. He also suggested that the Bishop Maxime Guisolan (1735-1814) introduced Retreat for Priests extended to three to four days. In order to win preachers, he made his first contacts with the Jesuits in Brig and Sitten . He maintained contacts with Father Joseph Sineo della Torre (1761-1842) and Nicolas Godinot, leading figures in the reconstruction of the Upper German Jesuit Province . Pierre Tobie Yenni first wanted to catch up on the theological educational deficit and he saw the activation of the deanery conferences as the most suitable means. His program essentially contains the following points:

• Increase in annual meetings from four to eight;
• Avoid the costly and lavish banquets that go with it ;
• Reading of the Synodal Statutes;
• Dealing with pastoral problems;
• Lecture on priestly virtues;
• Treatment of dogmatic and moral theological topics;
• strict adherence to the respective resolutions.

In order to counteract the grievances, he worked on the revision of the synodal statutes and, at the request of Bishop Maxime Guisolan, wrote a pastoral letter in 1809, which opposed attending night drinking parties ; Here he came more and more into the narrow field of vision of the episcopal curia. In 1812 he received from the bishop, together with Jean-Joseph Dey, to revise the synodal statutes from 1665. At the Easter Synod of 1812, the new synodal statutes were approved and put into effect and compliance with them made a special duty for the members of the priestly association. In the course of time he developed into the bishop's actual confidante and advisor.

Bishop election

Even before the death of Bishop Maxime Guisolan, there was an exchange of letters within the Correspondance ecclésiastique , which spoke of the upcoming bishopric. According to their ideas, the candidate should be committed to the ideas of the Restoration .

The candidate of the old-minded was Joseph-Claude Gaudard (1769-1815), professor of theology at the College of St. Michael. The opposing party's candidate was Jean Baptiste Girard , who had already failed in the previous election after the death of Bishop Jean-Baptiste d'Odet. Now it was a matter of winning the nuncio Fabrizio Sceberras Testaferrata for himself, because he was the decisive authority in the power play of that time. In a letter to the Roman State Secretariat, he recommended Joseph-Claude Gaudard for election. At the end of December 1814, Pius VII appointed the seriously ill Professor Gaudard Bishop of Lausanne, but he died on January 6, 1815. A week later, Fabrizio Sceberras Testaferrata had found a replacement candidate in the person of Pastor Pierre Tobie Yennis, as he was a Germanic to St. Chair was very connected . On March 20, 1815, the Pope chose Pastor Pierre Tobie Yenni; in contemporary liberal historiography, the election was seen as a victory for ultramontanism .

On May 4, 1815, Yenni took over the administration of the diocese from the hands of the diocese administrator, Vicar General Pierre Joseph Gauthier de Schaller, his former teacher. On the occasion of the secret consistory of July 10, 1815, the Pope solemnly appointed him to the episcopal office, so that Pierre Tobie Yenni moved into the episcopal residence on August 14. After a pilgrimage to Einsiedeln , accompanied by Jean-Joseph Dey and the later Vicar General Edmond d'Odet, he took the oath of allegiance to the Pope and the apostolic creed on the return journey in the presence of the nuncio and the two witnesses . On September 3, the nuncio consecrated the newly elected in the collegiate church of St. Niklaus .

In a letter to Pope Pius VII, Pierre Tobie Yenni writes: I would be incapable of bearing the burden of the episcopal office and would never have been persuaded to take it if the childlike trust in the apostolic chair had not persuaded me to do so. I will endeavor to follow all papal prescriptions exactly, since this zeal was, as it were, implanted in me from my youth; this virtue was able to develop fully in Rome when, as an alumnus of the Germanicum, I vowed special obedience to the father of all believers .

When in 1819 the canton of Geneva was annexed to the diocese of Lausanne, in 1821 he became the de facto bishop of Lausanne and Geneva.

In the summer of 1822, Jean Baptiste Girard gave a course for prospective teachers. Here he advocates mutual teaching, also known as the Bell-Lancaster method. Experienced students act as monitors to guide other students in groups of 7 to 10 students for individual exercises. Girard used this method at his school between 1816 and 1823, until the bishop, who had approved it in 1817, for moral reasons, ecclesiastically and politically also by the Grand Council of Freiburg; a year later, Pope Leo XII. a general ban on the Lancaster schools in the Catholic areas.

Strongly dependent on ultra-conservative forces in his environment, he campaigned for church reforms. Karl Ludwig von Haller carried out his secret conversion to Catholicism with him in 1820 . He built the diocesan seminary, encouraged the acceptance of new religious congregations in the diocese and helped reintroduce the Jesuits to Freiburg. He enjoyed particular esteem among the church people.

Fonts (selection)

• Pierre-Tobie Yenni; François-Louis Piller: Christian doctrine, or short term of the Christian doctrine of the faith: set up for the use of the youth and all Christian believers in the diocese of Lausanne. Fs. Louis Piller, Freyburg in Switzerland 1821.
• Pierre-Tobie Yenni, Jakob Bertschy: Two letters from His Episcopal Grace, the Most Revered Bishop of Lausanne and Geneva against mutual instruction: to the high government of the city and republic of Freyburg. F.-L. Piller, Friborg en Suisse 1823.
• François-Louis Piller, Léon pape, Pierre-Tobie Yenni: Bulls of our most holy father of Pope Leo XII, to announce the general jubilee for the holy year 1825 (in Rome) and to set certain indulgences. Franz Ludwig Piller, Freiburg in Switzerland 1824.
• Episcopi lausannensis et genevensis allocutio in paschali synodo 1831. LJ Schmid, Friborg 1832.
• Pierre-Tobie Yenni, Jacques-Xavier Fontana: Fasting Ordinance of His Episcopal Grace the High H. Bishop of Lausannen and Geneva for the year 1838. Franz Ludwig Piller, Freiburg in Switzerland 1838.

literature

• Pierre Tobie Yenni. In: Yenni's life and ministry before his appointment as bishop. Freiburg History Papers, Volume 55, 1967.

Web links

• Victor Conzemius: Yenni, Pierre Tobie. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
• Yenni, Pierre-Tobie. Index entry: German biography (as of May 2, 2019).

predecessor	Office	successor
---	Bishop of Lausanne-Geneva 1821–1845	Etienne Marilley
Joseph-Antoine Guisolan	Bishop of Lausanne 1815–1821	---