Pope Francis Meets with Top Mormon Leaders

[Cathoholic]

Pope Francis Meets with Top Mormon Leaders​

Thomas D. Williams Ph.D. 9 Mar 2019 Breitbart News

Pope Francis met with the leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the Vatican Saturday, the first meeting ever between the heads of the Catholic and Mormon churches.​

The occasion for the meeting was the dedication of a massive new Mormon temple in Rome, the first in the Eternal City, which will take place on Sunday. . . .

. . . The newly finished 156-foot high edifice — officially called “Temple of Rome” — was opened to the public for just over two weeks, with guided tours offered from January 28 through February 16. Once the temple is formally dedicated Sunday, entry will be “reserved for faithful members of the Church,” the group’s website states.

The Mormon Church boasts some 5,000 members in Rome, with a total of 23,000 throughout the Italian peninsula. The Temple of Rome, under construction for nearly ten years, is the first temple of the Latter-Day Saints to be built in Italy, which may well explain the presence of the entire Mormon leadership for its inauguration Sunday — the first time the entire leadership of the church has ever gathered outside the United States. . . .

Pope Francis Meets with Top Mormon Leaders | Breitbart

 

[AlNg]

Hopefully this will ease tensions between Catholics and Mormons. I have a friend who moved to Utah and he said that he was impressed at how friendly his Mormon neighbors were.

 

[1Lord1Faith]

Seems a little odd to me. Mormons consider themselves Christians don’t they? But I didn’t think that Mormons believe in the Trinity, which is one of the precepts of being Christian.

 

[deacon3b]

From study and from a Mormon Friend of mine. They believe that if each man lives righteously enough they become exalted and gain their own celestial dominion. They teach that God the Father of humans on earth was once a man (who lived on another planet) prior to gaining exaltation himself. All aside they are friendly people, however, their religious belief system is vastly distinguishable from ours. They use similar terminology but define those terms qute differently than we do. BTW they are not trinitarian. They do not believe the three persons are one God. They believe they are three Gods in one Godhead. I do not know much about Joseph Smith’s theological training prior to aside from the fact that his family was marginally methodist-ish. He claimed to have his first vision when he was 24, reported being visited by an angel called Moroni. They believe the book of mormon is sacred scripture. They also believe that each current president of the Church is a prophet of God, co-equal to any prophet including the prophets like Elijah, Jerimiah, Ezekiel…etc . Pretty different stuff there. But like I said, VERY nice folks for the most part.

 

[Feanor2]

LDS doctrine is pretty far removed from mainstream Christian, and certainly Catholic though.

But like Deacon said above- Morons are generally very friendly people and good citizens of their communities.

 

[FirstFiveEighth]

They consider themselves Christians and believe in a great apostasy that occurred basically just after Jesus ascended into heaven and believe that they follow the true Christianity that was lost for ~1800yrs. No, they do not believe in the Trinity but believe that the Trinity is three different gods. God was the first man to achieve godhood and gain his own dominion. He has a physical body. A bit like the “His Dark Materials” books come to think of it. Then, after becoming a god, he had a son with his spirit-god wife the Heavenly Mother- Jesus. Jesus was a spirit who achieved godhood as a spirit, then God placed him in Mary’s womb to allow for the exaltation of everyone else on earth, and he got his physical body that way. Mary is also now potentially God’s second wife in heaven next to the Heavenly Mother. The Holy Spirit is another god that is a spirit and does not have a physical body. They believe that every Mormon, if they live appropriately and believe in the ordinances of the LDS church, can achieve godhood as well. In addition to all this, they also acknowledge that other gods exist elsewhere. See the Heavenly Mother. I think they also believe that Jesus established the LDS church in America first before any Europeans came? Not sure on that. The long and short of it is they are polytheists, and their use of the term “Trinity” has very little to do with the Christian use of “Trinity”. Really the only similarity is the Latin root “tri”= 3.

Mormons have a reputation for being exceedingly nice people. I’m not sure how true this is- the Mormons I have met are just as nice as other people. I think the best virtue of Mormonism is their support for and propensity to form strong families, which I believe comes from their belief that the family unit stays together in heaven.

Personality I find the whole belief system completely bizzare and there are major flaws in the theology starting right at the beginning with Smith and Young that rely a lot on 19th centuryisms. Such as Egyptology and secret texts, and their waffling on clearly taught practices by Smith and Young like polygamy and that black people were black because they were decendents of Cain and therefore had a lesser spirit that prohibited them from being full members of the church and receiving exaltation and which justified slavery.

I personally do not understand how anyone converts to Mormonism when there are all these indicators that it was wholly invented by a dude in New York during the Great Awakening who “translated” the revelations he found using treasure hunting divination rocks and that flies on the face of at least 1,500yrs of what Christians believed, but such is life.