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"...The church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth."
I Timothy 3:15
Who Was Hated?
From Bloody Mary, 1978
In Catholic countries the Inquisition was called upon to step up its age-old process of weeding out the tares in the spiritual vineyards for burning leaped upward in the third and fourth decades of the century. But even in regions where the Protestants made themselves a majority—as in Calvinist Geneva, the Zwinglian cantons of Switzerland and the Lutheran territories under Charles V’s rule—men and women of differing views were subjected to savage repression.
Of all these dissidents the most feared were opponents called Anabaptists, whose belief in the necessity of adult baptism radically alienated them both from the faith of Rome and the doctrines of Protestants. In Catholic and Protestant lands alike Anabaptists were mutilated, drowned, garroted, burned and suffocated without mercy. Their lands were seized, their houses torn down, their children driven off to beg their bread.