Mormons baptizing our Pope posthumously

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Seeks God:
You think having friends is like a horror movie? You scare pretty easy then…(Just kidding)

Coming to God in heaven does not mean that EVERYTHING on earth is destroyed, it just means that there is no need to receive Graces from God, because we have been fully brought into His Grace when we enter heaven. The Catholic Sacraments is how we receive God’s grace while on earth; when we are in heaven the Sacraments are fullfilled because we are with God to worship him perfectly. We never, however, become like God.

Can you do me a favor and explain the LDS concept of the afterlife? I’m not afraid to admit that I know little of your faith…

SG
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Seeks God,
I think we all agree that no one really knows exactly how it will be and even what I understand it will be is a little different than what someone else might believe even in my own faith.
I believe that dying is like going through a door into another room, and on the other side you meet your family that has gone before you. It is a much better place than where we are now. Before the resurrection it is a waiting place where people are working and learning and preparing for the judgement day, the second coming and all of that. Then with the second coming and the judgement we will all be reunited with our bodies(resurrected) and earth will be perfected and receive her paradisical glory. We will then live with our families as we do now, with no pain, illness, crime and all of the things we suffer from now. God will reign and we will all be in His presence as His children and will continue to learn and progress throughout eternity. We believe that learning is never over, there is always progress to be made. Victor Hugo said:
" The nearer I approach the end, the clearer I hear around me the immortal symphonies of the worlds which invite me. It is marvelous yet simple. For half a century I have been writing my thoughts in prose, verse, history, drama, romance, tradition, satire, ode and song–I have tried all:but I feel that I have not said a thousandth part of that which is in me. When I go down to the grave I can say like many others, “I have finished my day’s work, but I cannot say “I have finished my life’s work”; my day’s work will begin the nex morning. The tomb is not a blind alley. It is an open thoroughfare. It closes in the twilight to open in the dawn. My work is only beginning; my work is hardly above its foundation. I would gladly see it mounting forever. The thirst of the infinite proves infinity.”

I did not mean that being with my friends would be horrible, I just meant that I need to know MY friends as I know and love them now, not just have the same feelings for everyone, and not really know my own family and friends. That to me, would be like having alzheimers, not like heaven at all. :eek:
BJ
 
I should ask you the same question, since thay are dead and in the spirit prison why don’t they make that choice. If the LDS church is the True Church and baptism for the dead is a requirement, then why don’t the names for the baptism candidates come straight from revelation.
With regards to personal attatchment to the deceased the LDS Church should explain that to the Jewish community that is up in arms again about the LDS practice of baptism for the dead.

God bless,

ex-mo

Ex-mo,
Just wanted to say the Jewish community is OK now. They have worked out their problems with the baptism for the dead and they are not up in arms any more.
Guess the Catholics are next. I am Irish and have a lot of Catholic ancestors, wonder what will happen if and when I get around to baptizing them. It is very time consuming and frankly I probably won’t get to the Catholic part of the family, apparently they all converted to Presbyterian and Methodist before they immigrated to the US.
BJ 😉
 
BJ,

First of all I hope you realize I was teasing you…🙂
I totally agree that we that the people we know now, we will also know in heaven. My point earlier (and I’m not criticizing, just explaining) is that on earth we receive graces due to our falln state as mankind; in heaven, we are fully united with God and have received His full grace. Catholic Sacraments are the means to receiving God’s grace on earth and once in heaven there is no need for Sacraments; therefore marriage is no longer needed (Since it is a Sacrament). My own wife struggles with this concept as a Catholic - so it’s one of those little things I don’t discuss 😛 'cause I gotta stay in her grace’s as well…hahahaha

SG
 
Don’t get me started on the Mormon practice of baptizing dead people without permission. :mad:

Several years ago they baptized by proxy ALL the Holocaust victims. A Jewish group got wind of it and raised holy hell. The Mormon church backed down and removed their names from the membership rolls (or however they un-do a baptism by proxy) and tried to make amends by presenting to the same Jewish organization a beautifully constructed volume containing all the names. It was a nice gesture but they should NEVER have done it in the first place.

Still steaming…since half of my relatives a Jewish and I feel very protective of God’s Chosen People.
 
BJ Colbert:
…we are all brothers and sisters and hence one big family. It still sounds a little lonely, because brothers and sisters are not always close and with billions of them…
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You’re still (as Chris put it so nicely) projecting earth to Heaven. There will be no loneliness. You will be closer to people in Heaven than you can even possibly imagine on earth. There will be no need of the “family unit” because we will all be perfectly united.
 
BJ Colbert:
I still want my own family with me in a family unit, but at least I understand your concept a lot better. We agree that we are all God’s children and we are all brothers and sisters and hence one big family. It still sounds a little lonely, because brothers and sisters are not always close and with billions of them I still would want my immediate family and my parents and grandparents with me in my own little tight circle. I’m sure heaven is going to be very large to hold all of the people who have ever lived since the beginning of time. I want my family to live nearby, like they do now. Thanks Chris, you are a good guy and a good Catholic.🙂
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I believe we will not be separated from those we love–on the contrary, we will be reunited. We will only gain family members, not lose them. And we don’t even need a special sealing ceremony for this either, because in heaven we are all one family under the fatherhood of God with our elder brother Jesus Christ in the love of the Holy Spirit.

Many Mormons seem to be afraid of not be sealed because they will lose their families. Nothing could be further from the truth. We don’t lose anything–we gain everything. Our limited human faculties cannot even begin to comphrehend the joy of the perfect family we will be reunited with. The Catholic Church believes the Trinity is itself a family, one that our earthly families are imperfectly modled after.
 
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Chris-WA:
I believe we will not be separated from those we love–on the contrary, we will be reunited. We will only gain family members, not lose them. And we don’t even need a special sealing ceremony for this either, because in heaven we are all one family under the fatherhood of God with our elder brother Jesus Christ in the love of the Holy Spirit.

Many Mormons seem to be afraid of not be sealed because they will lose their families. Nothing could be further from the truth. We don’t lose anything–we gain everything. Our limited human faculties cannot even begin to comphrehend the joy of the perfect family we will be reunited with. The Catholic Church believes the Trinity is itself a family, one that our earthly families are imperfectly modled after.
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Dang Chris! In two posts you’ve been able to do what all the rest of us haven’t been able to do in all our responses! Very well done!
 
Actually the Mormon church deceived the Jewish community. They agreed to stop the proxy baptisms and destroy the records. They have not done so. Therefore a Jewish delegation is preparing to meet them again and demand an explanation.

The real issue is that the LDS church does not ask permission of families to do this. If I discovered they had “baptized” some of my family without asking if it was okay I would be very offended. Leave our dead alone. They made their choice in life. Honor that choice. You can pray for them, but that’s it. The LDS church is “dead” wrong here.
 
Catholic Dude:
Help me out here, what are these guys doing? They are supposedly “Baptizing” someone who is not even there? Its one thing if they physically forced Jews or Catholics in there and did that its another thing if they are just “going through the motions”.
Why are the Jews mad about this? If anything they would feel sorry for those poor confused individuals. And really what are you trying to stop? Its no different than witchcraft and satanic spells cast in someones garage for “souls”.
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CatholicDude:

The theology of the LDS Church suggests that only baptised Mormons in good standing go to ‘paradise’. All others-excepting the ‘Sons of Perdition’ go to ‘spirit prison’, an afterlife existence. (The ‘Sons of Perdition’, which include murderers, adulterers, Mormon apostates, and other sorts of abominably-wicked souls, go directly to 'Outer Darkness, essentially equivalent to Hell). Both paradise and spirit prison are anterooms to Heaven itself, which will not be achieved until the Last Judgement. Heaven, in Mormon theology, is trisected into three separate realms of glory (celestial, terrestial, and telestial), and only those who accept the Mormon Gospel in it’s fullness can ever hope to achieve the celestial and highest level of Glory. This life is expected to serve as the ordinary opportunity for human beings to accept the LDS Gospel and to receive the ordinances of baptism and so forth; but Mormons recognize that not everyone is able to receive that gospel in this life–some are simply beyond the reach of the Mormon missionaries, others have had their consciousness so clouded by innacurate information that they could never hope to receive the LDS message.

Therefore–so believe the Mormons–those in paradise have free access to the souls in spirit prison and go there regularly to ‘proclaim the Gospel to those in prison’, as Peter suggests in a slightly obsucre passage of one of his letters. Those in spirit prison who accept the Mormon Gospel are then candidates for admssion to the Celestial Kingdom, the highest level of Heavenly glory. Even in spirit prison, the acceptance or rejection of the Mormon gospel will be fully voluntary. It is generally believed that those who had opportunity to accept the LDS message in this life and who did not do so will find it even more difficult to accept that message in the next life–but will do so KNOWING that they are voluntarily choosing some lesser degree of Heavenly glory than the Celestial. In other words–having some measure of fuller knowledge of God and our eternal destiny will NOT necessarily predispose people in spirit prison to accept the Mormon gospel.

It is important to realize that only during earthly existance can one receive the ‘ordinances’ of the Gospel which one needs to gain access to the Celestial Kingdom. These include baptism, marriage, and certain Mormon temple ordinances. Since dead people cannot receive these ordinances in person, Mormons believe they have been authorized to perform such ordinances ‘in proxy’ on behalf of dead persons. Whether or not the departed soul benefits from such ordinances will never be known in this life–just as one’s prayers for a particular soul in purgatory may or may not benefit that soul. In Catholic teaching, one might pray for a departed soul in hopes that such a person is in purgatory when in fact the soul of that person is already in Heaven or is in Hell. By the same token–Mormons are baptised on behalf of departed souls without ever knowing for certain whether that person actually accepts LDS teachings in the afterlife or receives any benefit whatever from the proxy baptism.

So far as what Mormons actually ‘do’ with respect to baptism for the dead: this service can only be performed in one of their LDS temples. Quite simply, someone with a valid LDS temple recommend (a license to enter a Mormon temple, given only to the most-faithful of Latter-day Saints) submits the name of a departed person and requests to be baptised on behalf of that person. Normally only men can be baptised for men, women for women. One is addressed by the name of the departed person and told, ‘on behalf of so-and-so, I baptise you in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost’. The person is then fully immersed, head to toe. Hope this clarifies both the practice and the teachings behind the practice.
 
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cestusdei:
Actually the Mormon church deceived the Jewish community. They agreed to stop the proxy baptisms and destroy the records. They have not done so. Therefore a Jewish delegation is preparing to meet them again and demand an explanation.

The real issue is that the LDS church does not ask permission of families to do this. If I discovered they had “baptized” some of my family without asking if it was okay I would be very offended. Leave our dead alone. They made their choice in life. Honor that choice. You can pray for them, but that’s it. The LDS church is “dead” wrong here.
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There are various confusions here. In some cases the records of Jewish or half-Jewish converts to the Mormon Church who had been baptised by proxy for their own departed were preserved. In some cases it was not clear who was Jewish or not. In some cases, individual Mormons submitted names for baptism-by-proxy to LDS temple authorities which should not have been accepted, based upon the agreement signed with Israel–but MormonTemple authorities accept thousands upon thousands of names for proxy baptism daily and cannot investigate each one individually. The rest is up for investigation. The LDS Church may or may not have behaved deceptively-it is premature to assume the facts before an investigation is complete.

Cetusdei is an anti-Mormon bigot predisposed to put the worst possible face upon anything about Mormonism. His religious practices, such as praying for the dead, are OK–Mormon religious practices, such as ordinances on their behalf, are somehow offensive to him. I would not be offended to learn that he was praying for departed members of my family without my permission–in fact I think he does so already since I have a stepfather who was once baptised Catholic (but raised Pentecostal)–therefrore presumably my stepfather would be included in whatever prayers Cetusdei offers for souls who might be in purgatory. In Mormon theology, performance of proxy ordinances does not incur any obligation upon either the departed soul or their surviving family to accept Mormonism. It is a pious and harmless practice, though IMHO entirely inefficacious. As are Cetusdei’s prayers on behalf of souls in a non-existant (IMHO) ‘purgatory’.
 
I don’t really understand what the problem is here. I would be chuffed if a Mormon friend decided that he would do my ‘temple work’.

If you don’t believe in it, why let it have any power over you? Surely they’re only trying to do something they see as beneficial- a nice thing to do?
 
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TomK:
I am displeased with the Mormon apologetics approach here.

As a Catholic, I don’t give a rat’s ___ about the “authority” to hold a rite. I think the point of the discussion is what gives the Mormons the right to baptize someone after their death without approval of the next-of-kin or their adherents? [Please note the difference in spelling between the two]

How would the Mormons feel if they found out that was Rome returning the favor by baptizing your prophets, apostles, seventies? Rome could claim the same grounds as “the Only True Church.”

In essence, it is a profound sign of disrespect.
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Code: 
Wrong, it is a sign of very high respect, if they didn't care very deeply about those persons they would not take the time to research their families and baptize them.
Also, as I pointed out in an earlier post a lot of my relatives are Catholic, so when I get around to being baptized for them they will be from all religions as well as Catholic. We don’t do it because they are Catholic and we want to make Catholics mad. We baptize them because they are OUR parents or grandparents or aunts and uncles and we love them. 🙂
I don’t know where the information came from that we were going to baptize your Pope, but you guys have better information sources than I do. No one told me about it until I read it here.
Do you have a specific reference for that information, so I can read it directly from the source? :confused:
Thanks, and thank you for all the prayers and novenas offered on my behalf by Catholic friends and relatives through the years, I am extremely grateful for their love and caring. I can use all the prayers I get on my behalf from any source.
BJ 👍
 
Seeks God:
We don’t believe in eternal marriages because we don’t beleive we will become Gods over our own planet to poulate with our celestial families. Not only that we also believe that while in heaven we have no need for sacraments at that point because we are already with God.
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I know that I won’t be a God or Godess, but I know that I want to be with my husband for eternity(I love him that much) I believe God 's plan is the same in heaven as on earth, only perfected. Henceforth we will be married in heaven as we are on earth. Being God is reserved for God. If others aspire to that, I can’t speak for them, and I am sure if that happens it would be millions of years in the future. 🙂 BJ
 
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cestusdei:
Actually the Mormon church deceived the Jewish community. They agreed to stop the proxy baptisms and destroy the records. They have not done so. Therefore a Jewish delegation is preparing to meet them again and demand an explanation.

The real issue is that the LDS church does not ask permission of families to do this. If I discovered they had “baptized” some of my family without asking if it was okay I would be very offended. Leave our dead alone. They made their choice in life. Honor that choice. You can pray for them, but that’s it. The LDS church is “dead” wrong here.
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Dear Cestusdei,
I will pray for you to learn charity to others and develop love for your fellowman whatever their differences might be. I am sure you are good man, and have had some very bad experiences in your life, I am truly sorry for the bitterness and anger you are feeling.
The LDS Church and the Jewish leaders met to discuss the “problem” last week. It was in the newspaper. They all settled things in an amicable way and there was no demanding of anything. I do not have to ask permission to baptize my own relatives. The ones I personally have baptized died in 1952 and 1965 respectively and they were my grandparents, I did not ask permission of my other relatives who are Catholic and they did not care, because they pretty much don’t believe the baptisms are valid. The only persons who should be offended are those who believe they are valid, true baptisms, otherwise what is all this fuss about? I appreciate anything you want to do for me in your Church and God will decide what is valid and what isn’t. I like to be covered on all sides with good thoughts and prayers.
Thank all of you good Catholics who have said prayers for my soul, I love you for caring and having my welfare on your minds.
My husband appreciates prayers from his parish and from my ward, it keeps us going through our daily trials. Knowing that good people in both churches care and want him to walk again is a great strength to us. Thank you again and again and keep praying.
BJ

🙂 🙂
 
BJ Colbert:
I know that I won’t be a God or Godess, but I know that I want to be with my husband for eternity(I love him that much) I believe God 's plan is the same in heaven as on earth, only perfected. Henceforth we will be married in heaven as we are on earth. Being God is reserved for God. If others aspire to that, I can’t speak for them, and I am sure if that happens it would be millions of years in the future. 🙂 BJ
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That’s an interesting comment. I was always taught that if we were sealed to our husbands and they failed to attain the Celestial Kingdom (thereby becoming Gods of their own planets), we would no longer be sealed to them but would rather become as angels in heaven. We would minister to those in the Celestial Kingdom, but not as families.

Maybe they’ve changed the teaching since I left in the 80’s.
 
I left in 1979, and came back in 1999 and they still teach what they taught then. We are told if we are faithful and keep the commandments and achieve certain things we will attain the Celestial Kingdom, but who really knows. Some who believe they are perfect are going to be very surprised, and the humble who don’t know where they stand may also be surprised. I don’t like to speculate about where I will be. I know too well that things can change. You think you are on the right path and all of a sudden you get sideswiped. I don’t think that will happen to me again, but it is a constant struggle to stay on the straight and narrow. I know I don’t even come close to being as good a person as some are.
I don’t know what tests lie ahead in my life, I don’t know if my Catholic husband will ever accept the Gospel, but I will have him baptized post mortem and he knows that. He is glad, because he does not know for sure which church is true, so if he doesn’t change here, he definitely wants the chance to choose in the spirit world. Right now, all I can do is hope that everything will turn out the way I would like it to.
I believe it will, because I can’t imagine life without him and my children and grandchildren. It is not my place to speculate about where anyone will be, all I can do is hope, and have faith in God and His good judgement.
🙂 BJ
 
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