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Mormon Leaders Send New Signals On Old Practice
When Mormon leaders agreed to stop baptizing Jewish Holocaust victims posthumously, it signaled a fundamental change in a practice Mormons hold dear. The change is more than just a renewed call to Mormons to trace their lineages and vicariously perform ordinances such as baptism for their ansestors in the faith's temples.
It's a reversal of what in recent decades had become second nature to many fervent members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: trips to the temple to perform sacred ordinances for historical figures they venerate or for persons whose lives had no link to their own.
It was no accident this past week that when Elder Monte Brough told Holocaust survivors of the Mormon practice of baptizing for the dead, he stressed that most members follow doctrine and do temple work only for their ancestors. His statements surprised many Mormons. Because that's not the way it was in the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s. Apparently, though, it's the way the church's governing First Presidency - President Gordon B. Hinckley and his two counselors - want it to be.
"The big task the First Presidency has given me is to bring under some control this whole idea that members can just extract various names,quot; Brough, the signatory to the Holocaust victims' agreement and executive director of the church's Family History Department, said in an interview. Vicarious temple ordinances for the dead are no small matter to Mormons. They are considered a solemn obligation and blessing for the living, and an offering of the Mormon mantle to those no longer living but existing in a spirit world.
Mormons believe that everyone, in this life or the next, will have an opportunity to embrace the one true gospel. If they do, temple ordinances considered necessary to their post-mortal progression will have been performed for them by living proxies. The crucial importance of the ordinances put the church in an uncomfortable position in the middle of this century, according to a new book, quot;Hearts Turned To The Fathers,quot; which details the church's development of the world's largest genealogical library to support its work for the dead.
Church doctrine had always required members to trace their ancestry and do temple work for their own. But because of lack of training, research sources and time, few members could complete their family genealogies. Those who did could not keep up with the demand at the temples for names of the dead. Without them, the temples were left to perform only ordinances for the living, and some even reduced their hours of operation, according to the book published by BYU Studies at church-owned Brigham Young University.
That was not acceptable to church leaders. In 1961, the church began extracting names from the microfilmed parish records and oral histories the church was collecting from around the world. quot;It was not a shift in doctrine. It was a recognition that 'Why shouldn't we be doing temple work for any names of those who have passed?' The idea being that every son and daughter of God will have the chance to accept or reject the concept,quot; said James B. Allen, one of the book's coauthors and a senior research fellow in church history at BYU.
At first, names were culled from records of countries where early Mormons originated, such as England, Scandinavia and Mexico. In time, the quot;name extraction programquot; became routine.
As historian D. Michael Quinn noted, the temples, being built at a pace that would raise the number from 10 in 1958 to 46 last year, are quot;like this massive sponge that requires an unending supply of names.quot;
In recent decades, when Mormons attended a temple, they would take their own names or be given slips of paper with names provided by other members or, more likely, extracted from the foreign records. And while Brough contends the church strategy has always been to extract names in those countries with a high probability of ancestors of today's Mormons, he concedes there's no guarantee they were.
Paralleling the extraction program was a considerable loosening of the requirements on members submitting their own names. In the 1960s, the church began allowing submissions of single names rather than entire family trees. Submission rules were liberalized even more in the 1980s. In 1981, members were allowed to submit names regardless of a family relationship, as long as the person had been dead for nearly a century or the family gave permission.
In 1987, submission policies permitted the clearance of people with incomplete names, estimated dates and places of birth or marriages unknown. quot;This meant that virtually any person known to have lived could be cleared for ordinance work,quot; according to the book. Members took the new freedom to heart.
Equipped with personal computers and tapping into the vast and increasingly automated resources of the genealogical library, Mormons as never before began collecting names and dates and taking them to the temple.
In 1975, church members provided just 26 percent of the names used in temple ordinances; the church's extraction program provided the rest. By 1990, however, those proportions had reversed and today, members supply about 70 percent of the names. For many, the freedom was exhilarating. Cecelia Konchar Farr, a former BYU English professor, describes how she and fellow feminists went to the Provo Temple to perform ordinances for about 50 women in literary history over a year's time. Farr was baptized for Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen; others for Emily Dickinson and Willa Cather. The women saw it as a gift to persons for whom they had great respect, and it heightened their own sense of spirituality, said Farr, who now teaches at St. Catherine's College in St. Paul, Minn. Never did they believe what they were doing was wrong. But Brough, who took over the Family History Department in 1993, said submissions made without regard to family are out of line.
Even Mormon wards have been misguided when they launched so-called quot;adopt-a-parishquot; projects in which children were sent to the temple for proxy baptisms and their parents for other ordinances, he said.
"Frankly, we as church leaders just get busy doing other things and we've allowed a little slack in this,quot; Brough said. quot;There's some tightening up that we have to do.quot; The new thrust is for members to stick with their own ancestry, or with names of persons likely to be ancestors, he said. quot;The problem with private extractions is there's no quality assurance,quot; Brough said. quot;There are a lot of reasons why members should not undertake these private extraction processes on their own.quot;
Whatever the policy, the Family History Department has amassed a large bank of names that temples will be able to draw from for years. The church has photographed onto microfilm records of births, christenings, deaths and marriages in 101 countries, and that work continues in nearly 50 countries today. Brough said modern-day Mormons are carrying out the mandate of church founder Joseph Smith, who said, quot;'Our dead cannot be saved without us and we cannot be saved without them.' quot;It is fundamental to our whole existence.quot;
Source: AP News Salt Lake City, May 1995.