Menno Simons

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.