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Vatican delegation takes part in Anabaptist movement’s 500th anniversary commemoration
June 04, 2025
Cardinal Kurt Koch, prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity, led a small Vatican delegation to the Anabaptist movement’s 500th anniversary commemoration in Zurich, Switzerland.
Cardinal Koch read aloud a message from Pope Leo XIV to participants at the commemoration. Msgr. Usma Gomez, head of the dicastery’s Western Section, took part in a dialogue on baptism with representatives of the World Mennonite Conference and the Lutheran World Federation.
Encyclopaedia Britannica describes the Anabaptists as “a fringe, or radical, movement of the Protestant Reformation and spiritual ancestor of modern Baptists, Mennonites, and Quakers,” adding:
The movement’s most distinctive tenet was adult baptism. In its first generation, converts submitted to a second baptism, which was a crime punishable by death under the legal codes of the time. Members rejected the label Anabaptist, or Rebaptizer, for they repudiated their own baptism as infants as a blasphemous formality. They considered the public confession of sin and faith, sealed by adult baptism, to be the only proper baptism.
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