Menno Simons

Life and work

Menno Simons was ordained a Catholic priest in 1524 but grew doubtful of transubstantiation and, later, infant baptism as he studied scripture. The 1535 death of his own brother, killed among a group of radical, violent Anabaptists suppressed by authorities at Bolsward, deeply affected him and pushed him toward open break with the Catholic Church in 1536.

Menno emerged as a leader of the more moderate, pacifist wing of the Anabaptist movement, which had been badly discredited in the eyes of both Catholics and mainstream Protestants by the violent, apocalyptic episode at Münster in 1534–35, where radical Anabaptists had seized the city and instituted a chaotic theocratic and polygamous regime before being brutally crushed.

Traveling and writing under constant threat of arrest — Anabaptists were persecuted by Catholic and Protestant authorities alike for rejecting infant baptism and, in most cases, participation in warfare and civil oaths — Menno organized scattered Anabaptist congregations in the Netherlands and northern Germany into a more stable, disciplined church movement.

His followers became known as Mennonites, and the tradition he shaped — emphasizing believer's baptism, church discipline, nonresistance, and separation from worldly power — spread to North America with later waves of migration and continues today among Mennonite, Amish, and related Anabaptist communities.

In their own words

"True evangelical faith... cannot lie dormant; it clothes the naked, it feeds the hungry, it comforts the sorrowful."Foundation of Christian Doctrine

Further reading

• Encyclopedia Britannica: Menno Simons