Menno Simons
1496 CE–1561 CE · Pingjum
Menno Simons (c. 1496–1561) was a Frisian-born Catholic priest who in January 1536 renounced his orders and joined the Anabaptist movement in the Low Countries, becoming its most influential northern leader. He articulated the core Anabaptist convictions of believers' baptism (rejecting infant baptism as unscriptural), the gathered and disciplined church, strict nonresistance, and separation from the world. His voluminous writings, above all the Foundation of Christian Doctrine (1539), gave theological coherence to communities scattered across the Holy Roman Empire and circulated clandestinely under imperial persecution. Spending his final decades as a fugitive in East Friesland, the Lower Rhine lands, and the Baltic coast, he nonetheless held the movement together through pastoral letters and repeated personal visits. The Mennonites — the largest surviving Anabaptist tradition — take their name from him.
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PingjumNetherlands
What they did here
In 1524, in his twenty-eighth year, Menno entered priestly service and was assigned as vicar to Pingjum (his ordination at Utrecht may date to c.1515–16 or to this same assignment in 1524 — sources differ); here he first began doubting Catholic eucharistic doctrine.
About Pingjum
Pingjum, a village in Friesland, in the northern Netherlands. Menno Simons began his priesthood there in the 1520s, where his doubts about Catholic doctrine first arose.
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