Mormons baptising the dead? What's that about? – Telegraph Blogs

Saturday 12 July 2014 | Blog Feed | All feeds

Mormons baptising the dead? What's that about?

A fascinating insight into the Mormon Church from Ha'aretz newspaper.

The Jewish community has asked Mormons to stop baptising their ancestors who died in the Holocaust.

Holocaust survivors said this week they are trying to negotiate with the Mormon Church over posthumous baptisms of Jews killed in Nazi concentration camps, saying the church has repeatedly violated a 13-year-old agreement barring the practice.

In 1995 the Mormons, aka The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, agreed not to perform baptisms or other rites for Holocaust victims, except in the very rare instances when they have living descendants who are Mormon.


But there have been complaints that particularly enthusiastic Mormons have been carrying out proxy baptisms for prominent historical and religious figures including the members of other faiths.

For example the Ba'al Shem Tov, the 18th century founder of the Hasidic Jewish movement, was baptised a Mormon.

Ernest Michel, chairman of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors, said on Monday: "We ask you to leave our six million Jews, all victims of the Holocaust, alone, they suffered enough."

Mormons say that because millions of people lived and died without learning the teachings of Jesus Christ and without belonging to his Church, ordinances such as baptism and eternal marriage should be carried out on their behalf.

They believe this restores a practice followed by early Christians. 

But not all modern Christians are that comfortable with  it.  In September this year, there was a story about how the Bishop of Kerry, Bill Murphy, is battling to protect parish records to ensure they are not used by Mormons to baptise dead Catholics.

In fact the Vatican ordered Catholic dioceses worldwide to withhold member registries from Mormons so that Catholics could not be baptized.

The Belfast Telegraph had an interesting article by the veteran Irish anti-clericalist Eamonn McCann asking why Catholic bishops were so concerned about Mormons baptising dead parishioners – he says the Mormons didn't invent baptism of the dead, a practice which has a significant history within mainstream Christianity. He adds: "What's the difference, anyway, between baptising the dead and baptising babies?"  Neither, after all, are especially sentient for their choices.

I don't want to offend any Mormons who might read this but I'm a bit stunned that people baptise the dead. Muslims wouldn't be caught dead, as it were, in this malarky. In fact, conversion to Islam is a significantly easier process than almost any other religion, requiring simply a sentence of affirmation. Could that account for our worldwide growth? That, like an ex-Poly, our entry requirements are so low.

I digress.  As does the author of a really rather crazy mad conspiracy site I've come across, outlining apparent similarities between  Islam and Mormonism.

No 1 on the list of "similarities" is: "The followers of Muhammad and Joseph Smith both killed innocent "infidel" on the same date of 9/11. On September 11, 1857, Mormon militia massacred about 140 men, women and children under the authority of Brigham Young. However 17 very young children were spared and adopted into Mormon families. They were in fact sold to the highest Mormon family bidder and resold and traded many times afterwords. This event is called "The Mountain Meadows" massacre. Mormon leaders engaged in a deliberate rewriting of history to deny they were behind the murders. On September 11, 2001 Muhammad's followers, using the Koran as a guide, sent two airplanes into the World Trade Center killing 3000 innocent men, women and children. Muslims today have a PhD in rewriting history and preach in the mosques that Jews were actually driving the planes, not Muslim terrorists."

Which, I think, all goes to prove nothing at all – except, why on Earth did they not include the Freemasons as well?

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