Vatican letter directs bishops to keep parish records from Mormons

Catholic News Service ^ | May 2, 2008 | By Chaz Muth

[colorcountry]

Fip Ping

Narses, this might be of special interest to you.

[ChinaGotTheGoodsOnClinton]

Ping

[Milly]

help me here I use the LDS site on my Ancestry research .
Am i reading this correctly ‘I should not be saving anything to there site ?
any help will be appreciated

[colorcountry]

I am not Catholic. I’m just posting the news, here. Perhaps you should ask your Priest.

[AppyPappy]

” In an effort to block posthumous rebaptisms by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints”

Why would they worry about it?

[Colofornian]

(Well, I suppose the next step would be to go into Catholic cemetaries, dig up the corpses, dunk them by immersion, & then return them...that way, they won't necessarily "miss out" on Mormon "salvation" just because they had the "misfortune" to belong to a "sect" that Joseph Smith said...
...had 100% creeds that were supposedly an "abomination" to whatever entity appeared to them...
...had "professors" who were supposedly 100% "corrupt")

Source for Smith's assessment of the Catholic Church: Pearl of Great Price LDS "Scripture," Joseph Smith - History, vv. 18-20.

[Graybeard58]

I’m not Catholic but I find the whole thing a hoot.

Baptizing dead people by proxy is utterly ridiculous but no more so than some of the other weird crap the mormons have come up with.

[colorcountry]

Perhaps because they view the “rebaptism” of their dead, by a group they don’t consider Christian to be sacreligious and disrespectful.

I wouldn’t like it, would you?

[ArrogantBustard]

Giving LDS the records (knowing that the LDS will then use them for "posthumous baptisms") might be seen as recognising the legitimacy said "posthumous baptisms". In fact, the Church considers any LDS "baptism" to be invalid, spurious, null-and-void, utterly without effect ...

[AppyPappy]

I just had this image of a women sitting in a chair having a cocktail with a priest in Heaven and suddenly a voice calls out:

“Edith Miller, please report to the Mormon district”
“DAMN! Hold my drink, father”

[AppyPappy]

I won’t care. They can have at it.

[colorcountry]

LOL. n i c e !

[Utah Binger]

Oh....Man? You mean I can’t get me another 72, 14 year old dead Catholics up there? Now they have gone way too far.

Honey...........wait until you hear this.

[bboop]

Arrrggghh, this will impact genealogists so much. SLC has the best records in the world; people come from Germany to look up German records which they cannot access in their own countries. And since the majority of Europeans are/ have been Catholic, it has been just wonderful to have access to them.

[MEGoody]

Um, why is the Catholic church worried about any Mormon re-baptisms. They don’t actually believe that counts, do they?

[Loyalist]

Isn’t this the religious equivalent of the Democrats putting the dead on their voters lists?

[colorcountry]

It’s a matter of disrespect and arrogance.

Let’s say I created a ceremony to make all their ancestors gay. Now, the fact that they don’t believe in my ceremony doesn’t change the fact that my doing so is disrespectful to their grandparents and the choices he/she made while alive. It’s arrogant of me to assume that anyone but myself wants it and that I have any sort of power to do so.

It doesn’t matter if I can smile and say...”But your grandpa can still choose not to accept homosexuality up in heaven. This just gives him the opportunity to be gay since he didn’t know about it in this life.”

It wouldn’t be a homo vs. hetero argument at all...it’s a simple case of respect for someone’s completed life.

[workerbee]

Do LDS believe that the souls of the unbaptised-LDS dead are in hell? Do they believe that picking a name out of a book and “performing” a baptism on the name of a dead person moves their soul from hell to heaven? Not being sarcastic, I just really have no idea what this is supposed to accomplish.

[colorcountry]

As a person who was once LDS, I will try to explain it.

Mormons believe in three levels of heaven. ALL people (universal salvation) get to one of the levels. There are required ordinances that one must perform in order to move to a higher Kingdoms. Without a Mormon baptism, one is relegated to the lower kingdom, never having a chance to dwell with God in the highest Kingdom or Christ who is a separate personage.