A.D.,
It is not a predicament at all. It means I understand what the Savior was saying, and I understand what it would mean to “altogether turn therefrom,” and so forth. It means I understand the witness, and have indeed received such a witness with no uncertainty about it. Even had I not served in the kinds of callings that mean I have been long since a High Priest, that witness means the same thing to an Elder who has received such a witness, which is the Comforter witness just as the Savior promised, and is an abiding witness throughout life as promised by Him based on the conditions He taught about with clarity and love.
This may sound off topic until my last couple of questions. I have only once before written of most of what follows:
As a High Priest what would you say about another High Priest requiring tenants in a property he owns to steal water as part of the rental agreement? I will go further, and ask what you think of a High Priest – considering the laws of consecration - who would inform his tenants he had water rights before making them sign an obligation to steal the water to which knew he had no rights?
I am going to go further: When I was a missionary in Brazil Sao Paulo North Mission 1982-1983, we regularly baptized investogators who had done everything they could to repent of adultery. Brazil then required five years for divorces to be complete, and a shorter time with a “desquite” (sp?), a formal statement of separation. This was new. Brazil had just recently begun allowing divorce at all.
It was common, culturally, for young people to marry, get a couple of years down the road, and break-up from an impulsive relationship. After a couple of years each partner – during this time when divorce had been illegal anyway – to get in a more serious relationship with someone else, move in together, start having babies, and pretty soon they had a family going.
We might meet them when they had several children, a genuine family dynamic at work – but they were not married to each other, and often each of them was married to somebody else. If they filed a desquite, and the mission president approved, they could be baptized, and would have to complete the divorce process to move on for the other “blessings” of church membership.
On one occasion, when I had been in country about eight weeks, my companion and I had to speak with the male in a relationship. His son who was serving a mission elsewhere in Brazil. The mother of the rapaz – the young man – wanted to join the LDS Church, but could not. She and the Father were living together, he was marrried to someone else, had been through their entire 20-year plus relationship, and he would not divorce the wife with whom he had not even lived for nearly 20 years – he still supported his wife.
My companion and I had a discussion with him, discussed the LDS being subject to civil authorities, of God being a part of these authorities, and made certain he accepted eternal responsibility for the mother of his child not being able to marry into this relationship. He accepted full responsibility, refused to divorce his wife, and we baptized the woman.She had done all she could for repentance, and “it is by grace alone we are saved, after all we can do.” (Book of Mormon)
My Mission President went on to serve five years on the Second Quorum of the Seventy. His boss was Elder Joseph B. Wirthlin, for whom I translated in Araraquara, who later became a member of the Countcil of the Twelve.
I will not on the evil things I did in the 23 years between being released honorably from my mission and discovering Catholicism. Some were terrible – they surprised me more than anybody else. When I sought to become a Catholic, the Catholic Church did not care about them. Do you know what they did care about? I had been married twice before and was on a third marriage. The process for determining this was shortened by the fact that since 2001 LDS baptism has not been considered valid, and neither of my exes had ever been baptized-- and I would be last to call either a Christian marriage.
I am the most evil of sinners. I am among all men most blessed in what I know has been forgiven me. I NEVER lied to my LDS leaders about anything I did. NEVER! The single thing I feel most guilty about is trying to convinvce one man in Brazil to divorce his wife so I could have an LDS baptism to my credit.
I believed Mormonism completely untilI first expereinced a Catholic Mass with an open mind. I hdecided for psychological reasons to rebuild my value system from the ground up in 1988, and that still, surprisingly, led me back to Mormonism in 2002. I found Catholicism durning Christmas 2006-2007 – and I was not looking for anything else. I went to a Christmas Mass because I always attended a neighborhood Christmas service(and this was the first year I almost did not because the only Church was Catholic).
So – back to point: First, you will want to call me a liar. This is 100 percent truth. From your perspective as an LDS High Priest, was my mission president an apostate? Was his leader an apostate? Do you say amen to the priesthood and authority of those men? Were their ordinances valid? Perhaps you completely agree with what I have said. In that case, we Catholics need to know if you think this sounds completely reasonable and justified .
This is the truth. Since I was 17, I never lied to my stake president, to my mission president, or to any other LDS authorities: I believed it. I believed that the eternal salvation of my soul depended on the organization’s judgment upon me.
Don’t you?
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