AmericanPapist Comments
Isn't it amusing how folks are trying to call this some kind of great slam?
"VATICAN TELLS PARISHES TO KEEP PRIVATE RECORDS PRIVATE AND NOT AID IN THE RELIGIOUS POST-DEATH CONVERSIONS OF ANOTHER FAITH."
Not like they can't use normal family histories, or even public records, they just can't get masses of Catholic records to fill their desire.
Ouch, a bit harsh, it seems to me. Post-mortem baptism seems useless, at most, not insidious in any way. Furthermore, I believe the litmus test for Christianity is slightly more complicated than you make it out to be.
Read what Mormons believe! Mormonism certainly isn't Christian. Jesus is not God, according to them. They do not believe in the Holy Trinity. That is what makes a Christian. Their idea of heaven: that they will be become a god of an entire planet.
I once was acquainted with a homeschooling Mormon family whose son was just overly fascinated with Star Trek. It really fit in with their beliefs.
Lauren- I flinch at that, too, but...basically, if you don't believe Jesus is the son of God, then you're not Christian, because you don't believe the Christ has come.
I *like* the side-effect of their beliefs, which is a very nice ancestral database, but I still don't want the Catholic Church to work with them.
So Thomas, I link to your story on this and somehow you avoid getting hit with a comment on how Mormonism is a restoration of Christianity to 1st century roots? How is it that you avoided getting hit with that comment, and I didn't. Would anyone theologically more educated (or ecclesiologically for that matter) please respond for me? I'd rather not get my blood pressure up and have it turn into a blog yelling match. Thanks!
Yeah that's me with the World Bishops link down there.
While genealogy, independent of its use by the LDS for baptism of the dead, may not be of the greatest import to either the Mormons or the Catholics, forbidding access by the LDS to parish records will cut off practical access to historical records for thousands of genealogists. Regardless of their reason for preserving those records, they were presevering them and making them available for little or nothing to anyone who wanted them, with no religious test required. In many places, such as Poland, there are no, few, or inconsistent civil records and the parish records are the only game in town. Though I'm an American, I'm writing from Poland where I've just spent the third week spread over a six year period photographing the original record books of a parish which the Mormons have not reached and which, because they date back 300 years are rapidly deteriorating. There are many parishes here where the records will not be preserved before they become unusable or, as has already happened in far too many cases, been destroyed by war or, more often, fire. Now only those who can afford to travel to Poland and spend weeks here, hiring translators to help them convince priests that they aren't Mormons, will be able to do genealogy work in the thousands of parishes which the LDS has not already recorded. That suspicion has already hampered many genealogists' work here and one must wonder if in the near future there won't be some parish priests, in Poland or elsewhere, who will not allow access to records unless you can produce a letter with official seals showing that the researcher is a Catholic in good standing at some parish in the US. It is important to note that the Vatican's objection was not to the copying of the records, per se, but to the use to which the copies were being put. If non-LDS genealogists publish parish records, will the Vatican close down all access to parish records if LDS starts taking those genealogical publications and baptising the people mentioned? It has to be acknowledged that the records belong to the Catholic Church and were kept, one must presume, for religious purposes and only secondarily as vital statistics records, but to react in this way to a practice the Vatican says is invalid seems a tad extreme. Is the Vatican going to order the cessation of Knights of Columbus spaghetti suppers because they allow some people to engage in gluttony, which as I recall, is one of the seven deadly sins? A few moments thought can come up with any number of other Catholic practices which can constitute an occasion of sin. How about their failure to have oral inspections with a flashlight and tongue depressor to prevent consecrated hosts from being orally stolen by Satanists for desecration in the Black Mass? Or their failure to allow priests to marry so as to cut down on the number of ... well, you can finish that one.
I think you meant inter-faith not ecumenical. The Mormons are not Christians, which means that they are not part of the ecumenical movement, even if the prayer service was.
Marcel's penchant for gentle precision. Music to my ears. :)
Commenting by HaloScan
