Remembering the cloud of witnesses: second ecumenical conference on 16th-century martyrdom

Mennonite and Catholic historians and theologians met July 26–28 at Saint John’s Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in Minnesota, to continue the study of 16th-century religious martyrdom they began last year.

The conference was entitled, “Sixteenth century martyrdom in ecumenical perspective.” Ivan Kauffman, a Washington, D.C.-based writer and one of the organizers, provided this framework: “The church today stands between a past marred by extensive violence and a future committed to peacemaking. We must somehow connect our historical past to our very different future.”

Among the papers was a case study of an early Anabaptist martyr, Hans Schlaffer, presented by C. Arnold Snyder, a Mennonite professor of history at Conrad Grebel College in Ontario and author of Following in the Footsteps of Christ: The Anabaptist Spirituality. Focussing on Schlaffer’s prison writings, Snyder showed how Schlaffer’s willingness to die for his faith followed directly from the Anabaptist experience of spirituality. Gelassenheit, a heart surrendered or yielded to God’s grace and the Holy Spirit, brings, in Schlaffer’s words, “the mind of Christ” and readiness for the “baptism of blood.”

A second case study, by Professor Peter Erb of Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, considered the Schwenkfelders who immigrated to Pennsylvania after oppression in 18th-century Germany and then developed a tradition of being a community of martyrs in the cause of religious freedom. A third comparative study of a Catholic 16th-century martyr was to have been presented by Peter Nissen of the Univeristy of Nijmegen in the Netherlands but was prevented by illness.

Conference participants endorsed the formation of an organizing committee to plan an institute dedicated specifically to the ecumenical study of Christian martyrs.

—from Mennonite World Conference release