I understand the history of the Mormon religion has gone through some changes since the time of its founder, Joseph Smith.
Recently our Serra Club had a guest speaker who is a Mormon. He indicated during his talk that on many issues Mormons think a lot like Catholics, but I was puzzled that he did not go into any significant detail on that score.
Does anybody know the current chief doctrines that distinguish the Mormon religion from traditional Catholic and Protestant Christianity?
Please don’t send me to Wikipedia if you have a more authoritative source. Thanks.
According to the Catholic Church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is not Christian.
In his article “A Mormon? Seriously?” Chris Ferrara had this to say:
"Should Romney win the Presidency, the nation’s quasi-monarchical Chief Executive will be a member of—why mince words?—a fantasy cult invented 200 years ago by a lunatic in upstate New York.
It all began back in 1823 with Joseph Smith, inventor of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (all Mormons in good standing being saints). Smith had been having visions for quite some time, including an apparition of God the Father and Jesus. One day an angel by the name of Moroni—no, really, his name was Moroni—informed Smith of the location of certain buried golden plates. Many Mormons believe the angel Moroni was once Captain Moroni, a military commander of the Nephites, the tribes that inhabited America around 1 B.C., when Jesus appeared at the Nephite Temple. (I think I have this right, but who really cares?)
The golden plates contained a summary by the great prophet Mormon of what the prophet Nephi (of the aforesaid Nephites) had earlier inscribed on a larger number of plates. Conveniently enough, the plates were buried on a hill near Smith’s home in Manchester, NY. After uncovering the plates—on his fourth annual attempt—Smith translated them with the aid of a “seer stone” he found in the bottom of a hat. By placing the seer stone over his face, he could read the otherwise indecipherable words on the golden plates. Whence the Book of Mormon, which contains such surprising revelations as the existence of three heavenly kingdoms in the afterlife that can be likened to first class, tourist class, and steerage on an ocean liner, with upgrades available as the journey progresses. (A few unfortunate souls, however, are cast overboard into eternal punishment.)
Any questions? Well, you might ask: Where are those golden plates? As the Mormons will tell you, Smith promptly returned them to the angel Moroni! What else would you expect him to do with such priceless sacred objects? The Mormon authorities assure us, however, that there is no reason to doubt Smith’s veracity, for they have carefully preserved the testimony of two groups of witnesses—the Eight Witnesses and the Three Witnesses—who swear they saw the plates before Moroni repossessed them. That settles that.
Long story short: Smith ended up being shot to death during a gun battle with rival Mormons at a jail in Carthage, Illinois where he had been imprisoned after surrendering on charges of riot. (Acting as mayor of nearby Nauvoo, Illinois, Smith had ordered the destruction of a rival Mormon faction’s printing press.) But Smith’s new religion survived. His successor, Brigham Young, acting as President of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles, led the cult into the salt flats of the Utah desert because not even Protestant America could tolerate their heresies. There the cult flourished against all odds. Today we have Salt Lake City, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, the Osmonds, and million-dollar TV commercials about how cool it is to be a Mormon—so cool that a Mormon will be the Republican candidate for President of the United States. All this because a lone man, with help of an angel named Moroni, had the guts and the gumption to found his own religion, gosh darn it. And isn’t that the American way?
I know you’re thinking: Wait a minute, what about this polygamy business? Not a problem, thanks to the Mormon innovation of Continuing Revelation.® In 1890 the then President of the Church of Latter Day Saints, one Wilford Woodruff, emerged from his meditations to announce that he had received a heavenly bulletin that God no longer approved of Mormon polygamy. Fortunately for Woodruff, God’s change of position did not apply retroactively to his own brace of five wives. Woodruff published the new revelation as the 1890 Manifesto, which mainstream Mormons consider divinely inspired. This revision of Mormon doctrine coincided rather neatly with a series of Congressional enactments penalizing polygamy and disenfranchising Mormon church corporations in the federal territories, and Supreme Court decisions upholding the laws—one of the few issues the federal government has gotten right, albeit for the wrong reasons. (Cf. Reynolds v. United States and Late Corporation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints v. United States).
True, even today there are fundamentalist Mormons who continue to insist on the divine ordination of polygamy. But not to worry: Romney is a mainstream Mormon (there are now three Mormon subdivisions: mainstream, fundamentalist, and reform). As such, he definitely adheres to the 1890 Manifesto—at least so far as we know."
, then the rest of us can tell you the other side afterwards.
