Anabaptist Beliefs and Churches

1. What Anabaptists Believe

Anabaptists hold four convictions that hang together as one position. Baptism follows a personal confession of faith, so it is given to those old enough to make one. The church is a gathered body of disciples who join it freely and can be released from it, distinct from the surrounding society and independent of the state. Discipleship, meaning the daily imitation of Jesus in ordinary conduct, is the point of Christian faith rather than a consequence of it. And the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount binds Christians literally, which rules out killing, warfare, lawsuits against fellow believers and the swearing of oaths.

Anabaptists themselves resisted the name. Anabaptist means rebaptizer, and it was a legal charge before it was a label, since Roman law inherited by the Holy Roman Empire punished rebaptism with death. The Swiss called themselves simply Brethren, the Dutch used Doopsgezinde, meaning baptism-minded, and all of them denied rebaptizing anyone. On their view an infant sprinkled without faith had received no baptism at all, so the water poured on a confessing adult was the first and only baptism that person had.

The Catholic Church answers each of those points, and the answers are set out in section 12 below. The disagreement is real and it is old. The Catholic reader should still notice how much of the Anabaptist case is built on Scripture read carefully, and how much of the modern world's assumption that faith cannot be coerced came into Western life through people who were killed for saying it first.

2. The Radical Reformation: Zurich, 1525

Anabaptism began on 21 January 1525 in a house in Zurich, when Conrad Grebel poured water over the head of George Blaurock at the request of Blaurock himself, and Blaurock then baptized the others present. The men were students and associates of Ulrich Zwingli, the reformer of Zurich, and they had spent two years arguing with him about how fast and how far the reform of the city's church should go. Days earlier the city council had ordered them to stop their meetings and to have their infants baptized. They met that night and did the opposite.

The Break With Zwingli

Zwingli had taught that Scripture alone settles the practice of the church, and his younger colleagues took him at his word. They found no infant baptism in the New Testament, no tithe, no state control of preaching, and no Christian magistrate executing heretics. Zwingli held that reform had to proceed with the consent of the Zurich council, because church and city were one community and a divided city would be destroyed. The radicals concluded that a church which waits on a council is a church governed by something other than Christ. Both sides believed they were following the same principle, and that is precisely why the break was so bitter.

The Reformation this came out of is covered in our guide to the Reformation and its causes, and the wider family map is in Christian denominations explained. Historians label the Anabaptists and their contemporaries the Radical Reformation, distinguishing them from the magisterial Reformation of Luther, Zwingli and Calvin, which advanced under the protection of magistrates and princes. The radicals wanted a church with no such protection.

The Movement Spread and Fractured

Within five years Anabaptist congregations existed across Switzerland, southern Germany, Austria, Moravia and the Low Countries, and they did not agree with each other. Balthasar Hubmaier, a trained Catholic theologian who became an Anabaptist at Waldshut and then Nikolsburg, defended believer's baptism and also defended the Christian magistrate's use of the sword in his tract On the Sword. Hans Hut preached an apocalyptic message across south Germany. In Moravia, Jakob Hutter organized communities that held all property in common. In the Netherlands, Melchior Hoffman's apocalyptic preaching drew large followings.

Muenster, 1534 to 1535

The one episode that Anabaptism has never been allowed to forget took place in the Westphalian city of Muenster. A militant apocalyptic wing, led first by Jan Matthys and then by Jan van Leiden, took control of the city in 1534, expelled those who would not be rebaptized, declared it the New Jerusalem, instituted community of goods and polygamy, and held out against a besieging army until the city fell in June 1535. The leaders were tortured and killed and their bodies hung in cages from the tower of St Lambert's church, where the cages still hang.

Muenster was used for centuries as the standing proof that Anabaptism led to anarchy, and Catholic and Protestant polemicists alike applied it to the peaceful congregations who had nothing to do with it. The peaceful majority rejected Muenster from the start, and the collapse pushed the surviving Dutch movement decisively toward nonviolence under Menno Simons, a Catholic parish priest at Witmarsum in Friesland. Menno's brother died with a militant band at the Oldeklooster in 1535. Menno left the priesthood in January 1536, joined the Anabaptists, and spent twenty-five years as a hunted pastor writing and organizing the congregations that took his name. His seal carried one verse.

3. The Schleitheim Confession of 1527

The Schleitheim Confession, agreed at a gathering of Swiss Brethren at Schleitheim on the Swiss-German border on 24 February 1527, is the founding statement of Anabaptist practice. Its full title is the Brotherly Union of a Number of Children of God Concerning Seven Articles, and Michael Sattler, a former prior of the Benedictine monastery of St Peter's in the Black Forest, is generally credited with drafting it. The document settles seven disputed questions, and every later Anabaptist body has worked from its agenda even where it has revised its answers.

The Seven Articles

• Baptism is for those who have learned repentance, amendment of life and faith in Christ, and who ask for it themselves. Infant baptism is called the highest and chief abomination of the pope.
• The ban is applied to baptized members who slip into sin, following the procedure of Matthew 18:15-17: private warning, warning before witnesses, then exclusion before the breaking of bread.
• The breaking of bread is for the baptized and unbanned alone, a memorial of Christ's body and blood shared by those already united in one body.
• Separation from the world means withdrawal from what the confession calls the abomination: the papal and the anti-papal works and services alike, the drinking houses, the civic and legal entanglements of a society at odds with the Gospel.
• Shepherds are chosen by the congregation, supported by it, and replaced by it if driven away or killed, which the article assumes will often happen.
• The sword is ordained by God outside the perfection of Christ, so that it punishes the wicked and guards the good. Christians do not use it, do not go to war, and do not serve as magistrates.
• The oath is forbidden entirely, on the authority of Christ's own words, since a person who cannot make one hair white or black cannot swear on anything.

Schleitheim is short, plain and severe. It contains no doctrine of the Trinity, no article on justification, no treatment of Christology, because it assumes the ancient creeds and addresses only the disputed practices. That is worth noting when Anabaptists are described as having invented a new religion. On the Trinity, the incarnation and the resurrection the Swiss Brethren held what the Catholic Church holds, and their descendants still do, which is why the Catholic Church recognizes their baptisms as Christian baptisms.

What Schleitheim Cost

Michael Sattler was arrested within weeks of the meeting. He was tried at Rottenburg am Neckar in May 1527 by Austrian authorities on charges that included rebaptism, teaching against the Eucharist, and saying that Christians should not take up arms against the invading Turks. His tongue was cut, his body torn with hot tongs, and he was burned. His wife Margaretha was drowned days later. The confession he wrote was in circulation across Europe within the year, including in a copy that John Calvin read and refuted.

4. Believer's Baptism and the Charge of Rebaptism

The Anabaptist case against infant baptism rests on the order in which the New Testament puts faith and water. In the Great Commission Jesus tells the apostles to make disciples and to baptize them (Matthew 28:19), and in Mark's ending the promise is that whoever believes and is baptized will be saved (Mark 16:16). At Pentecost Peter tells the crowd to repent and be baptized (Acts 2:38). The Ethiopian official is baptized after confessing faith (Acts 8:36-38). In every clear case, an Anabaptist argues, someone hears, believes, repents and is then baptized, and an infant can do none of those things.

Behind the exegesis lies an ecclesiology. Baptism, for an Anabaptist, is the pledge by which a person joins a covenanted community and submits to its discipline. Menno Simons and the Swiss Brethren both describe it as a covenant of a good conscience with God, borrowing the phrase from 1 Peter 3:21. A covenant requires a party capable of making it. Baptizing the whole population of a territory produces a church coextensive with the society, which is exactly what the Anabaptists thought had gone wrong with Christendom.

Why They Denied Being Rebaptizers

Every Anabaptist author insisted that the charge of rebaptism was a category error. A ceremony performed on an unbelieving infant, they held, is not a baptism that a later baptism could repeat. Grebel wrote that the water does not confirm or increase faith, and Menno wrote that the outward sign avails nothing without the inward reality. The Catholic Church has held since the Donatist controversy of the fourth century that baptism is unrepeatable and that its validity does not depend on the worthiness of the minister or of the recipient. The two positions are opposed on the same ground, and both know it.

How Anabaptists Baptize

Practice varies. The Swiss and Dutch traditions poured water over the head of the kneeling candidate, and Mennonites, Amish and Hutterites still do. The Church of the Brethren immerses three times forward, once for each Person of the Trinity, and the practice gave the group its old nickname of Dunkers. The Brethren in Christ immerse. In all of them the candidate answers questions before the congregation, promises submission to the discipline of the church, and is received as a member. Age varies by group and by family, and in the Old Order communities baptism usually comes in the late teens or early twenties, when a young adult chooses to remain.

One practical consequence still divides the two communions. The Catholic Church regards baptism with water in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit as valid wherever it is performed, and a Mennonite baptized as a believing adult who becomes Catholic is not baptized again. Anabaptist congregations, holding that an infant baptism was no baptism, ask a Catholic who joins them to be baptized on confession of faith. The asymmetry follows from what each body thinks baptism is, and both sides intend it as a matter of truth rather than of manners.

5. Nonresistance and the Sword

Nonresistance is the Anabaptist refusal to use force against another person, including in self-defence, in law enforcement and in war. The word chosen matters. Anabaptists have historically preferred nonresistance to pacifism, because pacifism can mean a political programme for abolishing war, while nonresistance names a form of obedience taken from a specific text and practised whether or not it changes anything.

Schleitheim's sixth article works out the reasoning. The sword is ordained by God and belongs to the governing authority, which Romans 13:1-7 establishes and which Anabaptists do not deny. The sword operates outside the perfection of Christ, meaning outside the standard to which the disciple is called. Christ himself refused to be made a king (John 6:15), refused to judge in a legal dispute (Luke 12:13-14), told Pilate that his kingdom is not of this world (John 18:36), and stopped Peter's sword in the garden (Matthew 26:52). A disciple therefore does not take the office of the sword, does not go to war, and suffers rather than kills.

The Historic Peace Churches

The Mennonites, the Church of the Brethren and the Quakers are known collectively as the historic peace churches, a term that came into use in the 1930s as the three bodies coordinated their response to conscription. In the United States during the Second World War they operated Civilian Public Service camps, where conscientious objectors did forestry, soil conservation and work in mental hospitals in place of military service. Their documentation of conditions in those hospitals contributed to reform of American psychiatric care. Mennonite Central Committee, founded in 1920 to feed Mennonites starving in southern Russia, became one of the significant relief and development agencies of the twentieth century.

Nonresistance has also cost these communities enormously. Mennonites and Hutterites emigrated repeatedly to keep it, from Switzerland to the Palatinate, from Prussia to Russia at Catherine the Great's invitation, from Russia to Kansas and Manitoba when Russian military exemption was withdrawn in the 1870s, and from Russia again after 1917. Two Hutterite men, Joseph and Michael Hofer, died in 1918 at Fort Leavenworth after mistreatment in military custody for refusing to serve, and most Hutterite colonies moved to Canada in response.

Sources: Mennonite Central Committee's own published history for its founding and relief work; the Civilian Public Service record and Selective Service documentation for the wartime programme; the Hutterite emigration to Canada is documented in the colonies' own chronicles and in standard academic histories of the group.

The Catholic Position on Force

The Catholic Church holds that legitimate defence can be a grave duty for those responsible for the lives of others, and it sets strict conditions for the use of armed force, treated in our guide to just war teaching. The Catechism also honours the Anabaptist witness directly: those who renounce violence and bloodshed and use the means of defence available to the weakest bear witness to evangelical charity, provided they do so without harming the rights and obligations of others (CCC 2306). Catholic teaching further requires that laws make provision for conscientious objectors, who are to serve the human community in another way (CCC 2311). A Catholic may not say that nonresistance is a misreading of the Gospel. A Catholic says that it is a legitimate and honoured path which the Church does not impose on every believer, because responsibility for the innocent can also bind.

6. The Ban and Shunning

The ban is the Anabaptist practice of excluding an unrepentant baptized member from the congregation and its communion, and shunning, called Meidung in the German-speaking communities, is the further practice of withdrawing ordinary social contact from a banned person. Both come from a literal reading of two New Testament passages, and both exist because a church without a magistrate has no other instrument of discipline.

Paul's instruction in 1 Corinthians 5:11 goes further, telling the Corinthians not to associate with anyone who claims to be a believer and lives in serious sin, and not even to eat with such a person. Anabaptists read that as covering the ordinary table as well as the Lord's table. The stated purpose is always restorative. Menno Simons wrote that the ban is medicine rather than punishment, aimed at bringing the member to repentance and back into the congregation, and every Anabaptist body maintains a procedure for reinstating those who confess.

The Practice Split the Movement

How strictly to shun is the question that divided Anabaptism more than any other. Dutch Mennonites fought over it through the sixteenth century, and the strict party held that a banned person must be avoided even by a spouse at table. In 1693 Jakob Ammann, a Swiss Brethren elder in the Alsace, pressed for strict social avoidance, twice-yearly communion, footwashing at the communion service and firm discipline of dress. Hans Reist and the Swiss elders resisted. Ammann excommunicated those who disagreed with him, and the congregations that followed him became the Amish.

Modern practice ranges widely. Most Mennonite conferences today rarely apply the ban and do not practise social shunning. Old Order Amish and Old Order Mennonite communities do, and in the strictest districts a member excommunicated after baptism is avoided at table and in business by family members. The pastoral consequences of that are severe and are contested inside those communities themselves. The full picture, including how the Amish handle Rumspringa, baptism and separation, is in our guide to Amish beliefs and practice.

7. Community of Goods Among the Hutterites

The Hutterites hold all property in common, with no personal ownership of income, land, housing or vehicles, and they have held goods in common since 1528, which makes them the longest-lived communal movement to come out of the Reformation. The practice lapsed in some communities during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries under pressure and dispersion, and was deliberately restored. The practice is called community of goods, and Hutterites treat it as a requirement of the Gospel rather than an economic arrangement.

The founding moment is dated to 1528, when a group of Anabaptists expelled from Nikolsburg in Moravia spread a cloak on the ground and laid their possessions on it. Jakob Hutter, a Tyrolean hatmaker, took leadership of the Moravian communities in the early 1530s and organized them into the disciplined form that carries his name. Hutter was arrested and burned at Innsbruck in 1536. Peter Riedemann, imprisoned in Hesse, wrote the Account of Our Religion, Doctrine and Faith in the early 1540s, and it remains the Hutterite confession of faith.

How a Colony Works

A Hutterite colony, called a Bruderhof in their own usage, is a working farm of roughly a hundred people. Meals are taken communally in a dining hall, children are schooled in a colony school, housing is assigned, and a colony manager and a preacher share leadership under the vote of the baptized men. Colonies are large-scale agricultural producers using modern machinery, which surprises visitors who expect Amish-style technological restriction. When a colony reaches about 150 people it divides and starts a daughter colony, which is why the number of colonies has grown steadily across the Canadian prairies and the northern plains of the United States.

Sources: Hutterite colony numbers and population estimates come from the colonies' own directories and from academic surveys published by the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College. Estimates place the group in the tens of thousands across several hundred colonies, and the direction has been consistently upward for a century.

What Catholics Should Recognise Here

Community of goods is not foreign to Catholic life. It is the basis of every religious order: Benedictines, Franciscans, Dominicans and Jesuits all profess poverty and hold goods in common, and the Rule of St Benedict cites the same passage in Acts. The Catholic difference is that the common life is a counsel embraced by a vocation rather than a command binding every Christian, and that the Church teaches a right to private property ordered to the universal destination of goods (CCC 2402-2404). A Hutterite would answer that Acts describes the whole church at Jerusalem and not a monastery. That exchange is a genuinely open one, and it is more interesting than most ecumenical conversations manage to be.

8. The Anabaptist Bodies Today

Six families of churches descend from sixteenth-century Anabaptism and its eighteenth-century offshoots, and they differ far more from each other than outsiders assume. The Mennonites are the largest and the most internally varied, the Amish the best known, the Hutterites the most communal, and the Brethren churches the result of a later fusion of Anabaptist conviction with German Pietism.

Mennonites

Mennonites take their name from Menno Simons and form the main body of the tradition. Mennonite World Conference, their global fellowship, links national conferences across Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and North America, and the majority of Mennonites now live in Africa, Asia and Latin America rather than in Europe or North America, with Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and India among the largest national churches. Theologically the range runs from Old Order Mennonites who use horse-drawn transport and worship in plain meetinghouses, through conservative conferences, to Mennonite Church USA and Mennonite Church Canada, whose congregations look outwardly like other North American Protestant churches while retaining believer's baptism and peace teaching. The Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective, adopted in 1995, is the most widely used contemporary statement.

Source: membership and regional distribution are those published by Mennonite World Conference in its own periodic global census of member churches, which reports baptized membership in the region of one and a half million worldwide. Any figure for the tradition depends on whether unbaptized children and Amish and Hutterite groups outside MWC are included.

Amish

The Amish separated from the Swiss Brethren in 1693 under Jakob Ammann over strict shunning, footwashing and discipline, migrated to Pennsylvania and the Midwest through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and no longer exist in Europe. Old Order Amish communities restrict technology by the Ordnung of each church district, travel by horse and buggy, worship in homes rather than church buildings, speak Pennsylvania Dutch, and end formal schooling at the eighth grade under the protection of the 1972 United States Supreme Court decision in Wisconsin v. Yoder. Their population in North America has roughly doubled every twenty years through large families and high retention, and the demographic work at the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies puts the figure in the hundreds of thousands. Our dedicated guide to Amish beliefs, the Ordnung and Rumspringa covers the community in detail, and this page will not duplicate it.

Hutterites

Hutterites live in agricultural colonies holding all goods in common, chiefly in Manitoba, Alberta, Saskatchewan, South Dakota and Montana. They divide into three groups, called Leut, distinguished by nineteenth-century origins and by degree of strictness: Schmiedeleut, Dariusleut and Lehrerleut. They speak Hutterisch, a Carinthian German dialect, use German for worship and English for business, and combine strict communal discipline with the free use of advanced farm technology.

Brethren in Christ

The Brethren in Christ began among German-speaking settlers along the Susquehanna River in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania in the late eighteenth century, where they were known as River Brethren. Their theology braids three strands: Anabaptist convictions on discipleship and peace, Pietist emphasis on personal conversion and heart religion, and, from the nineteenth century, Wesleyan holiness teaching on sanctification. They baptize by trine immersion, practise footwashing, and are strongly missionary, with sister churches in Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi and India that are now larger and faster-growing than the North American body. The Wesleyan strand they absorbed is traced in our guide to Methodism and holiness teaching.

Church of the Brethren

The Church of the Brethren was founded at Schwarzenau in Germany in 1708, when Alexander Mack and seven others baptized one another in the Eder river. The group combined Anabaptist ecclesiology with Radical Pietist devotion, emigrated almost entirely to Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century, and became known as Dunkers or German Baptist Brethren for their threefold forward immersion. Their communion is a love feast of footwashing, a fellowship meal and the bread and cup. They are one of the three historic peace churches, they run substantial relief and disaster ministries, and their own annual reporting shows membership in the United States below one hundred thousand and declining from a mid-twentieth-century peak. Several conservative bodies, including the Old German Baptist Brethren and the Dunkard Brethren, separated from them over dress, discipline and modernization.

Bruderhof

The Bruderhof is a twentieth-century communal movement founded in 1920 by Eberhard Arnold, a German theologian, at Sannerz in Hesse. Arnold sought out the Hutterites in North America in 1930 and united his community with them, and the relationship between the two has been broken and repaired at different points since. The Nazi regime dispersed the German community, and the movement moved to England, then to Paraguay, and later to the United States. Bruderhof communities today hold all things in common, run manufacturing businesses, and publish through Plough. By their own account they number a few thousand people in roughly two dozen communities across the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, Australia, Paraguay and South Korea.

Source: the Bruderhof's own published description of its communities and their locations; Church of the Brethren figures are from the denomination's own annual statistical reporting; Brethren in Christ growth outside North America is reported by the body's own global fellowship.

9. The Anabaptist Churches Compared

The table below sets the six families side by side on the questions that actually distinguish them. Each row states what that body holds in its own terms.

Positions are summarised from each body's own confessional and descriptive documents: the Schleitheim Confession, the Dordrecht Confession of 1632, the Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective, Peter Riedemann's Account of Our Religion, the Brethren in Christ Articles of Faith and Doctrine, the Church of the Brethren's published polity, and the Bruderhof's own account of its life.

10. The Executions: What Was Done to Them

Anabaptists were hunted, tortured and killed across sixteenth-century Europe by Catholic and Protestant governments alike, and the Catholic reader of this page should sit with that before reading the Catholic arguments in the next section. This is the part of the story that Catholic writing on the Anabaptists has too often skipped, and skipping it makes the doctrinal case less honest rather than more persuasive.

The Laws

Zurich, a Reformed city, was first. In March 1526 its council decreed that anyone who rebaptized would be drowned, a sentence chosen for its grim symmetry with the offence. On 5 January 1527 Felix Manz, one of the men present at the first baptism two years earlier, was bound and lowered into the Limmat from a fishing platform while his mother called to him from the bank to stay firm. He was the first Anabaptist executed by Protestant authority.

The Holy Roman Empire followed. The Diet of Speyer in 1529, an imperial assembly in which Catholic and Lutheran estates both took part, issued a mandate prescribing death for Anabaptists throughout the Empire, reviving a late Roman law against rebaptism enacted originally against the Donatists. Under that mandate a person could be condemned on proof of rebaptism alone, without a separate ecclesiastical heresy trial, and enforcement varied sharply between territories. Catholic territories generally burned the condemned as heretics; Protestant territories more often used the sword or drowning. Those who recanted were often spared, which is why the martyr accounts dwell so heavily on refusal.

The Dead

Michael Sattler, tongue cut and burned at Rottenburg in 1527, and his wife Margaretha, drowned days after him, were killed by Catholic Austrian authority. Balthasar Hubmaier was burned in Vienna in March 1528, and his wife was drowned in the Danube with a stone tied to her. Jakob Hutter was burned at Innsbruck in 1536. Dirk Willems, imprisoned in Asperen in the Netherlands, escaped across a frozen pond in 1569; when the guard pursuing him fell through the ice, Willems turned back and pulled him out, and was recaptured and burned. That story is the most reproduced image in Anabaptist memory, and it functions for them the way the Colosseum functions for Catholics.

Sources: the executions above are documented in the trial records of the relevant territories and collected in Martyrs Mirror (Thieleman J. van Braght, 1660), which remains the standard Anabaptist martyrology. On totals, the historian Claus-Peter Clasen's statistical study of Swiss, South German and Austrian Anabaptism documented 845 executions in the regions he surveyed, and wider scholarly estimates for the whole of Europe run into the low thousands. Figures beyond that range circulate online without documentation and should not be repeated.

What They Did With It

Martyrs Mirror, compiled by the Dutch Mennonite Thieleman J. van Braght and printed in 1660, runs to well over a thousand pages of trial transcripts, letters from prison and accounts of deaths, and in many Amish and conservative Mennonite homes it sits beside the Bible. The Ausbund, the hymnal still used by the Old Order Amish and the oldest hymnal in continuous Protestant use, contains hymns written by Anabaptist prisoners in the castle dungeon at Passau in the 1530s. A tradition that sings its ancestors' prison hymns every Sunday morning does not forget who killed them.

11. Called Together to Be Peacemakers

Called Together to Be Peacemakers is the report of the international dialogue between the Catholic Church and Mennonite World Conference, conducted in five annual sessions from 1998 to 2003 by delegations appointed by the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity and by Mennonite World Conference. The report was published in 2003, and it is the first formal theological conversation the two communions have ever held.

What the Dialogue Covered

The delegations worked through three areas. The first was a joint reading of history, in which both sides examined the sixteenth century, the medieval background, and the way each tradition had told the story to its own people. The second was theology: the nature of the church, baptism, and the Eucharist or Lord's Supper. The third was peace, where the Catholic just war tradition and the Mennonite peace church position were set against each other and against the shared conviction that peace belongs to the Gospel.

The Healing of Memories

The most consequential part of the report is its treatment of memory. Both delegations agreed that each community had transmitted an account of the other shaped by conflict, and that the purification of those accounts is itself a theological task. The Catholic participants expressed regret for the persecution suffered by Anabaptists at Catholic hands, and the Mennonite participants acknowledged that their own tradition had preserved and sometimes hardened an image of the Catholic Church formed in the years of persecution. The report does not settle the doctrinal questions, and it says so.

The dialogue sits within a wider Catholic act. On the First Sunday of Lent in the Jubilee Year 2000, in St Peter's Basilica, Pope John Paul II led a liturgy in which the Church asked forgiveness for the sins of her members across the centuries, including sins committed in the service of truth by the use of methods contrary to the Gospel. That confession covers what was done to the Anabaptists. Our guide to Catholic ecumenism and what it does and does not concede sets out the framework, and the pattern of institutional wrongdoing and repentance is treated in the guide to Church scandals.

Source: Called Together to Be Peacemakers, Report of the International Dialogue between the Catholic Church and Mennonite World Conference 1998-2003, published by the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity and by Mennonite World Conference. The Day of Pardon liturgy of 12 March 2000 is documented in the Vatican's own published texts for the Jubilee Year.

12. The Catholic Answer, Point by Point

The Catholic Church answers the Anabaptist position on four questions: who may be baptized, what the church is, what the Lord's Supper is, and whether a Christian may ever use force. On each one the Anabaptist argument has been stated above in its own terms. Here is what the Catholic Church holds and why.

On Baptism

Baptism is the sacrament by which a person is freed from sin, reborn as a child of God and incorporated into the Church (CCC 1213). Because it is God's initiative rather than a human achievement, the Church has always baptized infants: they are born with a fallen human nature, and the sheer gratuitousness of grace is shown most clearly where nothing has been earned (CCC 1250). The Catechism states that infant baptism is an immemorial tradition of the Church with explicit testimony from the second century onward (CCC 1252). The Council of Trent affirmed the practice against those who denied it in its decree on baptism in 1547. The New Testament records the baptism of entire households (Acts 16:15, 16:33, 18:8; 1 Corinthians 1:16), and Peter's Pentecost sermon extends the promise to the hearers and to their children (Acts 2:39). Paul links baptism to circumcision, the sign given to infants under the old covenant, calling it the circumcision of Christ (Colossians 2:11-12). The Anabaptist reply is that household texts do not prove infants were present and that circumcision is not a parallel, and that reply is honestly made. The Catholic case rests on the Church's practice from the earliest centuries read together with those texts.

On the Church

The Catholic Church holds that the Church founded by Christ is visible, hierarchical and mixed, containing saints and sinners together until the harvest, which is the plain sense of the parable of the wheat and the weeds (Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43). The Catholic objection to the Anabaptist ideal of a pure church separated from the world is that a gathered community of the sincerely converted still fills up with sinners within a generation, and that the attempt to keep it pure has repeatedly produced further division over discipline. Anabaptists answer that the church is called to be visibly holy whether or not it manages it, and that the ban exists precisely because it will not. The Catholic position is that the holiness of the Church rests in Christ and the sacraments rather than in the measured holiness of her members, and that the Church calls sinners in order to make them saints. The teaching office that guards that Church is treated in our guides to the papacy and Sacred Tradition and Scripture.

On the Lord's Supper

Anabaptists hold the breaking of bread to be a memorial in which the congregation remembers Christ's death and expresses its unity, and Schleitheim's third article restricts it to the baptized. The Catholic Church holds that the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ, that the whole Christ is truly, really and substantially present, and that the Mass is the same sacrifice as Calvary offered in an unbloody manner. The scriptural ground is Christ's own words at the Last Supper, the discourse in John 6, and Paul's warning that whoever eats the bread unworthily sins against the body and blood of the Lord (1 Corinthians 11:27). Our full treatment is in the guide to the Eucharist and the real presence. Anabaptists also reject an ordained sacrificing priesthood, choosing pastors by congregational call, and the Catholic case for holy orders is set out in the guide to the ministerial priesthood.

On the Sword

Catholic teaching honours nonresistance by name in the Catechism as a legitimate Christian response and a witness to evangelical charity (CCC 2306). It sets that alongside a second obligation the Anabaptist position sets aside: a person responsible for the lives of others may be bound to defend them, and legitimate defence can be a grave duty (CCC 2265). The Church accordingly sets strict limits on the use of armed force rather than a blanket permission or a blanket prohibition, and those limits are the subject of the guide to just war teaching. The strongest Anabaptist question to a Catholic remains unanswered by any appeal to the tradition: how often have those criteria actually restrained a Catholic nation at war? A Catholic who wants to argue with a Mennonite should be ready for that question, because it is a fair one.

What the Catholic Church Grants

The Catholic Church recognises baptized Anabaptists as Christians, in a real though imperfect communion with her (CCC 838), and the Second Vatican Council teaches that those born today into communities separated from Rome cannot be charged with the sin of that separation (Unitatis Redintegratio 3). Catholics may also take instruction from Anabaptist practice without conceding a single doctrine: the seriousness of discipleship as daily conduct, the refusal to let the faith be absorbed into national identity, the mutual aid that means an Amish barn is rebuilt in a day, and the readiness to be disliked. Our guide to Catholic and Protestant teaching compared takes the doctrinal differences one by one across the wider Reformation.

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