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Guest
The LDS Church and the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants (The Gathering) have been at variance for many years regarding LDS “ordinances for the dead”, the so-called proxy rites of baptism, endowment, ordination, sealing, and second anointing. The topic has been much in the news of late, and a recent visit to the LDS web site www.lds.org yielded some surprises in the “commentary” section.
Marlin K Jensen and Lance B Wickman, senior members of The Seventy and General Authorities in LDS hierarchy, are co-signers of a letter dated 6 Nov 2008 addressed to The Gathering. Several key points of this letter are instrumental in understanding why it is that Catholic declarations from the Vatican of recent date were made, in relation to similar conspicuous name gathering drawn from Catholic ecclesiastic records.
(1) The letter states first of all “that we are not going to agree on matters of theology.” Quite true. Catholics give no credence to the posthumous acts, particularly baptism or marriage. The prayers of the LDS are welcomed for our beloved dead, of course, but with a proper understanding that such prayers are efficacious within the limits of the mercy of God.
(2) The letter says LDS are “pained by [the] perception” that such acts are disrespectful to the dead and to their families. It is not merely a perception. The acts are disrespectful. Even the LDS Church (Church Handbook of Instructions) acknowledges the existence of the right of precedence, which briefly put is the religious freedom of immediate relatives and significant others to enable, or to block, LDS ordinance work from taking place. The LDS Church has been eager to enable, and quite slow to block, name clearance. Names are supposed to be withheld from temple processing for 110 years after birth and 75 years after marriage automatically, and longer for cause. It is incumbent on the LDS Church to recognize that faith communities other than their own have the right, and the duty, to seek to block such processing indefinitely.
(3) The letter continues, “that pain can be intensified when some represent our doctrines and practices as something they are not.” Examples follow of how a temple rite challenges the “Jewishness” of a person “or visits upon him something that detracts from the significance of his life or the way he died.” The LDS leaders refute this, claiming “it’s just an offer.” What the LDS authors do not seem to grasp is that the very act of name use establishes a record, the International Genealogical Index (IGI), a source frequently consulted by genealogists and historians. When multiple submissions, particularly those in error, are made to IGI, it creates bogus records. Those records, viewed in isolation, are clear efforts to extend Mormonism beyond the grave. For members of the Catholic Church who find a recent relative on the IGI, with or without footnotes, it is a challenge to “Catholicness” in the same way.
(4) The letter discusses the “New Family Search” names gathering technology, saying it will be an improvement over the “Temple Ready” system inaugurated in the early 1990s. “TR” allowed undocumented information to be batch processed to the temple system via home computer and permitted extreme abuses of inaccuracy and repetition to occur. Only LDS members have access to this “New” system, so it cannot be effectively monitored by anyone outside the fold. (LDS demand access to Catholic records without restriction, but Catholics cannot have access to LDS records without restriction?
) Corollary: how long will the IGI itself will remain on public read (now available only in abridged form on the LDS web sites)? The LDS leaders recommend that lists of Holocaust victims be provided so that the names can be flagged as “unavailable for ordinances.” Would this last more than a generation?
It is a myth that the LDS provide temple rites only for their own families. Ever since the early 1960s, the microfilmed records held by the Genealogical Society of Utah have been evaluated for temples under a program called Controlled Extraction. This program takes all the names in a given source and scores them up for proxies, irrespective of whether any named person is related to the submitter or the extractor. With over a hundred operating temples in the world, this has been seen as necessary to keep them active.
The “New” system is not an option for Catholics, as it would become a medium for the Controlled Extractions of the future. If “New Family Search” is an indication that Controlled Extraction is about to be abandoned, it is welcome.
Catholics need a Memorandum of Understanding of our own to resolve outstanding issues regarding the harvesting of Catholic names for LDS temples. This is particularly necessary where the records of the Church are impounded as the vital records of the state.
Opinions? Please limit your response to these issues.
Marlin K Jensen and Lance B Wickman, senior members of The Seventy and General Authorities in LDS hierarchy, are co-signers of a letter dated 6 Nov 2008 addressed to The Gathering. Several key points of this letter are instrumental in understanding why it is that Catholic declarations from the Vatican of recent date were made, in relation to similar conspicuous name gathering drawn from Catholic ecclesiastic records.
(1) The letter states first of all “that we are not going to agree on matters of theology.” Quite true. Catholics give no credence to the posthumous acts, particularly baptism or marriage. The prayers of the LDS are welcomed for our beloved dead, of course, but with a proper understanding that such prayers are efficacious within the limits of the mercy of God.
(2) The letter says LDS are “pained by [the] perception” that such acts are disrespectful to the dead and to their families. It is not merely a perception. The acts are disrespectful. Even the LDS Church (Church Handbook of Instructions) acknowledges the existence of the right of precedence, which briefly put is the religious freedom of immediate relatives and significant others to enable, or to block, LDS ordinance work from taking place. The LDS Church has been eager to enable, and quite slow to block, name clearance. Names are supposed to be withheld from temple processing for 110 years after birth and 75 years after marriage automatically, and longer for cause. It is incumbent on the LDS Church to recognize that faith communities other than their own have the right, and the duty, to seek to block such processing indefinitely.
(3) The letter continues, “that pain can be intensified when some represent our doctrines and practices as something they are not.” Examples follow of how a temple rite challenges the “Jewishness” of a person “or visits upon him something that detracts from the significance of his life or the way he died.” The LDS leaders refute this, claiming “it’s just an offer.” What the LDS authors do not seem to grasp is that the very act of name use establishes a record, the International Genealogical Index (IGI), a source frequently consulted by genealogists and historians. When multiple submissions, particularly those in error, are made to IGI, it creates bogus records. Those records, viewed in isolation, are clear efforts to extend Mormonism beyond the grave. For members of the Catholic Church who find a recent relative on the IGI, with or without footnotes, it is a challenge to “Catholicness” in the same way.
(4) The letter discusses the “New Family Search” names gathering technology, saying it will be an improvement over the “Temple Ready” system inaugurated in the early 1990s. “TR” allowed undocumented information to be batch processed to the temple system via home computer and permitted extreme abuses of inaccuracy and repetition to occur. Only LDS members have access to this “New” system, so it cannot be effectively monitored by anyone outside the fold. (LDS demand access to Catholic records without restriction, but Catholics cannot have access to LDS records without restriction?
) Corollary: how long will the IGI itself will remain on public read (now available only in abridged form on the LDS web sites)? The LDS leaders recommend that lists of Holocaust victims be provided so that the names can be flagged as “unavailable for ordinances.” Would this last more than a generation?It is a myth that the LDS provide temple rites only for their own families. Ever since the early 1960s, the microfilmed records held by the Genealogical Society of Utah have been evaluated for temples under a program called Controlled Extraction. This program takes all the names in a given source and scores them up for proxies, irrespective of whether any named person is related to the submitter or the extractor. With over a hundred operating temples in the world, this has been seen as necessary to keep them active.
The “New” system is not an option for Catholics, as it would become a medium for the Controlled Extractions of the future. If “New Family Search” is an indication that Controlled Extraction is about to be abandoned, it is welcome.
Catholics need a Memorandum of Understanding of our own to resolve outstanding issues regarding the harvesting of Catholic names for LDS temples. This is particularly necessary where the records of the Church are impounded as the vital records of the state.
Opinions? Please limit your response to these issues.
