A Village Priest in Friesland
Menno Simons was born in 1496 at Witmarsum in Friesland, in the northern Netherlands, to a family of farmers. Simons is not a surname but a patronym: Menno, son of Simon. He had a brother named Pieter. Friesland in his boyhood was a land fought over by mercenary armies until it passed to the Habsburg emperor Charles V. Menno was trained for the priesthood, learning Latin and some Greek and reading the writers the Catholic tradition calls church fathers, but by his own account he never read the Bible, fearing it would mislead him.
He was ordained a priest at Utrecht (sources date it anywhere from 1515 to 1524), and in 1524 he became vicar in the village of Pingjum, near his birthplace. Looking back, he described those years with shame: he and his fellow priests spent their time playing cards, drinking, and in frivolity. Within a year or two, while saying mass, he began to doubt that the bread and wine became Christ's flesh and blood. He turned at last to the New Testament and found no such teaching there. Luther's writings helped him see that human commandments could not bind the conscience to eternal death. He began to preach what he called evangelical sermons, but he kept his office.
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