Desiderius Erasmus was a famous humanist author. Born in 1446, he called for strong reforms in the Catholic Church, albeit from the outside. He did not believe that the Church could reform itself from the inside, so he called for people from outside the Church to prod the Church into a period of reform. He had a friend, SIr Thomas More, who was also a humanist writer, but he believed in reforms of the Church from within the Church.