"Direct Revelation" Says: No Immaculate Conception

"Berne [Switzerland] was the theater of one of the most reverberating scandals enacted by the contemporary church. A passionately contested theological issue of the day was whether the Virgin had been immaculately conceived. This was denied by the Dominicans and asserted by the Franciscans. Some of the Dominicans of the friary at Berne thought that the best way to settle the affair was to have a direct revelation. For their fraudulent purposes they conspired with John Jetzer, a lay brother admitted in 1506, who died after 1520. Whether as a tool in the hands of others, or as an imposter, Jetzer produced a series of bogus apparitions, bringing the Virgin on the stage and making her give details of her conception sufficiently gross to show that it took place in the ordinary, and not in the immaculate, manner. When the fraud was at last discovered by the authorities, four of the Dominicans involved were burnt at the stake." (121) --Preserved Smith, Reformation in Europe