Were so called from their founder, John Labadie, a native of France. He was originally in the Romish communion; but leaving that, he became a member of the reformed church, and performed with reputation the ministerial functions in France, Switzerland, and Holland. He at length erected a new community, which resided successively at Middleburg, in Zealand, Amsterdam, Hervorden, and at Altona, where he died about 1674. After his death, his followers removed their wandering community to Wiewert, in the district of North Holland, where it soon fell into oblivion. If we are to judge of the Labadists by their own account, they did not differ from the reformed church so much in their tenets and doctrines as in their manners and rules of discipline; yet it seems that Labadie had some strange notions. Among other things, he maintained that God might and did, on certain occasions, deceive men; that the faithful ought to have all things in common; that there is no subordination or distinction of rank in the true church; that in reading the Scriptures greater attention should be paid to the internal inspiration of the Holy Spirit than to the words of the text; that the observation of Sunday was a matter of indifference; that the contemplative life is a state of grace and union with God, and the very height of perfection.<\/p>\n
A pietist sect of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries founded by Jean de Labadie, who was born at Bourg, near Bordeaux, 13 February, 1610, and died at Altonia, 13 February, 1674. He was educated by the Jesuits at Bordeaux, joined their order in 1625, and was ordained ten years later. Having left the Society of Jesus in 1639 he preached successfully at Bordeaux, Paris, and Amiens, where in 1640 he was appointed canon and professor of theology. He exercised his priestly functions at Abbeville also, andin 1649 withdrew to the Carmelite monastery of Graville, near Havre, to avoid a conflict with the ecclesiastical and civil authorities. In 1650 he joined the Reformed Church of Montauban, where he was appointed professor of theology. In 1657 he took up pastoral work at Orange on the Rhône, because extraordinary preacher at Geneva in 1659, and seven years later accepted a call to the French-speaking congregation at Middelburg, Holland, where he refused to subscribe to the Belgian Confession or to recognizethe authority of the Reformed Church and founded a separate sect, whereupon he was expelled from the city. He then endeavoured to organize a community first in the neighbouring town of Veere, then at Amsterdam, where he permanently won over to his cause the learned Anna Maria van Schurman. On the invitation of the princess-abbess, Elizabeth, he removed in 1670 with some fifty-five followers to Herford in Westphalia. Having been banished also from this place in 1672, the congregation settled at Altona where De Labadie died. Shortly after his death, his followers, to the number of one hundred and sixty-two finally migrated from Altona to Wiewert in West Friesland. Here they reached the highest point of their prosperity, but even then did not number more than about four hundred. In 1680 they accepted an invitation from the governor of the Dutch colony of Surinam to establish a missionary settlement in his dominions. But the colony of “Providence” which they founded disappeared in 1688. A similar attempted atNew Bohemia on the Hudson in the State of New York also ended in failure. The congregation of Wiewert itself dispersed in 1732. In their doctrinal teaching, the Labadists laid great stress on the necessity of interior illumination by the Holy Ghost for the understanding of the Bible. The Church for them was a community of holy persons who have been born again from sin. These alone are entitled to the reception of the sacraments. Hence they frowned upon infant baptism, seldom celebrated the Lord’s Supper, and declared that marriage with an unregenerate person is not binding. They held property in common, after the example of the primitive Church, supported themselves by manual labour and held very lax views regarding theobservance of Sunday.<\/p>\n
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N.A. WEBER Transcribed by Christine J. Murray <\/p>\n
The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume VIIICopyright © 1910 by Robert Appleton CompanyOnline Edition Copyright © 2003 by K. KnightNihil Obstat, October 1, 1910. Remy Lafort, S.T.D., CensorImprimatur. +John Cardinal Farley, Archbishop of New York<\/p>\n
SEE LABADIE.<\/p>\n
LABADISTS Were so called from their founder, John Labadie, a native of France. He was originally in the Romish communion; but leaving that, he became a member of the reformed church, and performed with reputation the ministerial functions in France, Switzerland, and Holland. He at length erected a new community, which resided successively at Middleburg, … Continue reading “Labadists”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61286","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-encyclopedic-dictionary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/dictionaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61286","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/dictionaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/dictionaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/dictionaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/dictionaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61286"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/dictionaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61286\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/dictionaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/dictionaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/dictionaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}