MENNO, SIMONS. - Founder of the Mennonites, b. at Witmarsum (Holland) ca. 1496, d. at Aldesloe (Holstein) in 1559. Ordained priest in 1515 (or 1516), he was vicar of Pingium, and ca. 1531 parish priest of his native village. In 1531, the Dutch Anabaptist Seicke Snijder having been condemned to death for denying the validity of the Baptism of infants, M. wished to examine the question for himself and became persuaded that such Baptism was not valid; he also wrote to Luther, to Bucer and to Bullinger, all defenders of the Baptism of children (pedobaptism) and, not convinced by their reasons, he adhered to Anabaptist doctrines and was rebaptized in 1536 by Obbe Philips, organizer of the first Anabaptist church in Holland, of which M. was one of the principal leaders.
Meanwhile Swiss-German Anabaptism had taken on a revolutionary character in Germany, culminating in the massacre of Leiden (1535). That city having been occupied, many Anabaptists took refuge in Frisia and M. worked among the refugees to mitigate their fanaticism and succeeded in doing so. But the reputation of the preceding excesses had turned the civil authorities against them and therefore they were persecuted in Holland as well. M., who from 1537 to 1541 had been at the head of the Anabaptist or "Obbenite" community of Groningen, went to Emden where he had a dispute with the Polish heretic Giovanni di Lasco; in 1545 he took refuge, with his wife and children, in Cologne, then in Holstein; subsequently traveling through the whole of northern Germany, he propagated his doctrine there, founding Mennonite centers. During this time he wrote various pamphlets and treatises. He died near the count of Fresemberg, who had given him hospitality. M. knew how to put an end to the excesses of the early Anabaptists and is regarded as the second founder of the sect, renamed with the name Mennonite.
Bibliography2 works
Bax, Rise and fall of the Anabaptists, London 1903; J. M. Whiterow, Church rebels and pioneers, ibid. 1937; G. Welter, Histoire des sectes chrétiennes, Paris 1930, passim.
Camillo Crivelli