Jørgen Sadolin

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Jørgen Jensen Sadolin (c. 1490 - December 29, 1559 in Odense) was a Danish reformer, the son of Jens Christensen, a curate and subsequently a canon of Viborg cathedral, and consequently, in all probability, born c. 1499 out of wedlock, as his Catholic opponents frequently took care to remind him.

He himself never used the name Sadolin, which seems to have been invented subsequently by his son Hans, and points to the fact that the family were originally saddle-makers.

We first hear of him on December 1, 1525, when Frederick I permitted him to settle at Viborg to teach young persons of the poorer classes "whatever might be profitable." On this occasion he is described as "magister" and no doubt got his degree abroad, where he seems to have been won for the Reformation.

He sided with Hans Tausen when the latter first began to preach the gospel at Viborg and Tausen, though himself only in priest's orders, shortly before he left the place, ordained Sadolin (1529). Amongst "the free priests" who attended the herredag of Copenhagen in 1530 Sadolin occupied a prominent place. Frederick subsequently transferred him to Funen, where he acted, according to his own expression, as "adjutor in verbo" to the Bishop of Odense.

At the diocesan council on the May 27, 1532, during the absence of the bishop, he presented to the assembled priests a translation of Luther's catechism, with Luther's name omitted, preceded earnestly in favour of a better system of education and a more practical application of the Christian life, which occupies a conspicuous place in the literature of the Danish Reformation. In the following year Sadolin published the first Danish translation of the Confession of Augsburg.

On the September 2, 1537 he was consecrated by the German reformer, Johann Bugenhagen, who himself only had priest's orders, superintendent, or first evangelical bishop, of Funen.

As bishop he was remarkable for the success with which he provided the necessary means for the support of churches, schools and hospitals in his widespread diocese, which had been deprived of its usual sources of income by the wholesale confiscation of church property. Towards the Catholics he adopted a firm, but moderate and reasonable, tone, and his indulgence towards the monks in St Knud's cloister drew down upon him a fierce attack from the Puritan clergyman of Odense, who absurdly accused him of being a crypto-Catholic. He gave the funeral oration over Christian III in St John's Church at Odense in February 1559, though now very infirm and blind, and died at the end of the same year.