As if the bad PR related to its direct support of California's Proposition 8 isn't enough trouble, the Mormon Church has also found itself defending its actions with regard to deceased Holocaust victims. It seems that church members have been posthumously baptizing non-Mormons by proxy, including victims of the Nazi Holocaust. This in spite of the fact that the Church of Latter Day Saints (LDS) signed an agreement with a consortium of Jewish groups in May 1995 agreeing to cease this practice with regard to Holocaust victims unless the surviving family members provided consent.
In publicly denouncing this betrayal of what was thought to be a good-faith agreement, Ernest Michel, honorary chair of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors stated, "We ask you (Church of LDS) to respect us and our Judaism just as we respect your religion, We ask you to leave our six million Jews, all victims of the Holocaust, alone, they suffered enough." In response, Church of LDS elder Lance B. Wickman casually brushed aside Jewish concerns, ignored his own Church's violation of an agreement that it had signed, and stated, "We don't think any faith group has the right to ask another to change its doctrines. If our work for the dead is properly understood ... it should not be a source of friction to anyone. It's merely a freewill offering."
Well, chutzpah may be a Jewish (specifically Yiddish) term for audacity, but it more than certainly applies to Mr. Wickman and his fellow Church of LDS adherents. First of all, no one from Mr. Michel's organization is asking the Church of LDS to "changes its doctrines." As Mr. Wickman's grasp of English appears to be as shaky as his ability to honor signed agreements, let me kindly point out to him that a "doctrine" is something that is taught, whereas a "practice" is an act that is carried out customarily. It is the PRACTICE of Baptism of the Dead that is offending Jews and others.
As for Wickman's comment that Jews who are offended by this practice are at fault for not receiving it in the generous spirit in which it is offered, well, that is just bullshit. The intention clearly doesn't matter here. Various Jewish groups made it clear to the Church of LDS thirteen years ago that they do not wish for the Church to continue the practice of baptizing deceased Jews, and the Church of LDS signed an agreement stating that the practice would indeed cease. Who cares what the intention is when LDS is in clear violation of this agreement?
The Church of LDS has been furtively baptizing deceased Jews, among other deceased non-Mormons, for years. This practice is grounded in a selective reading of Paul (1 Corinthians, Ch. 15, v. 29), a passage that the Mormon Church is apparently exploiting to swell its numbers. Why? Because the constellation of Christian churches do not view Mormonism as a legitimate expression of Christianity. It's possible that the increased numbers gained through proxy baptisms for the dead are a way of demonstrating that there is wider acceptance of Mormon theology than actually exists.
In reading about this topic, I found one Jewish writer whose family has been directly affected by this very issue. Manya Brachear writes a religion blog for the Chicago Tribune called "The Seeker", and in her November 11 entry she describes how her Jewish great-uncle had converted to Mormonism and had arranged for her great-grandfather, a devout and observant Jew, to be posthumously baptized in the Mormon faith. She reflects upon how religion had served as an agent of separation and division in her family's past, and decides to accept this gesture in the spirit in which it was intended.
"We have the freedom to choose whether religion will unite us or divide us. In the past, my family chose to let it divide. Faced with this revelation, I now realize how torn they must have been. Still, I choose to learn from that mistake and appreciate my cousins' gesture."
I'm of two minds on this one. One the one hand, I applaud her reaction from an interfaith perspective. As a member of an interfaith marriage, I have great appreciation for any attempts made to maintain family ties and allowing room for different expression of religious faith. Further, I appreciate the particular difficulties inherent in such a choice for a member of the Jewish faith.
On the other hand, she is speaking in the context of her own family, where certain members actually belong to the Mormon Church and who did not hide their actions. This is not the case with regard to thousands of other Holocaust victims whom Church of LDS baptized in secret without the permission of their surviving family members.
From almost any perspective, and certainly from the perspective of constructive interfaith dialogue and relations, the Mormon practice of Baptism of the Dead is insensitive, invasive, and quite plainly, odd. The recent response on the part of Church leaders to the protests of Jewish leaders has been arrogant and condescending. This practice blithely disregards the painful history of the forced conversion of Jews by Christians throughout the centuries. It also perverts the doctrine of free will, which presumes that each person is free to make his or her own choices on the condition that they must also live with the consequences. It is preposterous to even suggest that someone who is deceased can still concern himself or herself with the question of whether or not to be baptized here on earth. Whatever choices we make in this life having to do with our religious faith is a deeply personal matter that is between each individual, his or her God, and any other people that this decision is shared with. Under this formulation, the Mormon Church is the missing participant for any such deliberation that does not involve someone's embracing the Mormon faith.
My message to the members of the Mormon Church: keep your hands off the dead, and concern yourselves with the living. Oh, wait. On second thought...
- Doug L.
Yad Vashem: The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Shoah group halts talks with Mormons on posthumous baptisms of Jews, by Ben Harris (The Jewish Journal, November 19, 2008)
Mormons, Jews Contend for Souls of Dead, by David Waters (WashingtonPost.com, On Faith, November 11, 2008)
Holocaust survivors to Mormons: Stop baptisms of dead Jews (CNN.com, November 11, 2008)
Vatican Warns of Mormon 'Baptism of the Dead' (Catholic.org, May 3, 2008)
Sunday, December 7, 2008
Mormon Baptism of the Dead Is Fatally Flawed Salvation Strategy
Thursday, December 4, 2008
Pope Questions Interfaith Dialogue, Favors Interfaith Monologue
Pope Benedict the XVI is on a roll, but more in the way that a broken record is than a body which is picking up momentum. Since ascending to the Papacy in April of 2005, Benedict has been busy...
- Recruiting exorcists;
- Dissing other Christian churches;
- Reinstating the Latin Mass for the first time since Vatican II;
- Dissing Islam (inadvertently or otherwise).
He's making a list.Your religion's not on it.
The Pope went on to stress the importance of "intercultural dialogue which deepens the cultural consequences of basic religious ideas," and called for confronting "in a public forum the cultural consequences of basic religious decisions." Um... I have an English degree, but I can't really make a whole lot of sense out of that statement. Intercultural dialogue is important, interrelgious dialogue not so much? Don't you run the same risk with intercultural dialogue, e.g., having to put your own cultural beliefs in "parentheses"?
OK, I'm getting lost in the weeds here. Whatever else Benedict might have meant by his recent comments, they appear to be of a piece with the stance that he, and by extension the entire Catholic Church, currently take in relation to the other religions of the world. That is to say: You've Tried the Rest, Now Try the Best. If the Pope truly believes that the entire truth of who God is and what God wants starts and ends with Christ and His Church, why bother even speaking with our faiths or cultures who do not acknowledge or accept this? Even if you want to maintain dialogue for the sake of appearances, why come out with a public comment making it clear that you don't actually believe much good comes from the dialogue in the first place? Why make the comments to an atheist author (Marcello Pera) with a Christo-centric view of European history and who takes an antagonistic stance towards Islam?
It's too bad, really. Pope Benedict is a highly educated man who is clearly at home in the academic realm. But his insistence on absolutes blinds him to the fact that the world is not static, and that everything is dynamic. Including religious faith. This dynamism is fueled in large part by the revelations that emerge when different faiths interact with each other, when beliefs are challenged and reexamined, shared and studied. As I wrote in an earlier post:
"Last year, an Israeli friend of ours asked me about my Christian faith and why I loved Jesus. I thought for a moment, and then replied that I held Jesus in deep respect and reverence for his teachings and his sacrifice on the cross. I added that when I die someday, if I discover that Jesus was not in fact the literal Son of God and was not resurrected from the dead, I would not love or revere him any less. The example of his life is strong enough reason for me to believe in and appreciate Jesus, to borrow Hanh's phrase, as an ultimate door. From this point of view, the teachings and living example of Jesus Christ can be made much more accessible to non-Christians, which in turn furthers dialogue and understanding between different people. Is this not the aim of any faith that preaches 'stability, joy, peace, understanding and love'? How does exclusivity advance this aim?"
- Doug L.
FOR FURTHER REFERENCE:
Pope Calls for Greater Understanding Between Catholic, Hellbound (The Onion, January 14, 1998)
What is the point of interfaith dialogue? (dotCommonweal, November 24, 2008)
Pope Questions Interfaith Dialogue, by Rachel Donadio (The New York Times, November 23, 2008)
Monday, December 1, 2008
Obama-Nation = Abortion-Nation?!?
Did you know that President-Elect Barack Obama is the "most radical pro-abortion presidential candidate ever"? Don't believe me? Just Google search that term, and your resulting hits will reveal the dregs of the American Right Wing universe, the members of which spent the better part of this past summer and fall braying about how Barack Obama is not just pro-choice on the question of abortion, he is actually pro-abortion. This is probably news to anyone who was paying attention to any of Mr. Obama's comments on the issue of abortion during the very long presidential campaign.
Regardless of these facts, they haven't stopped various extremists from making the claim. Mr. Obama's candidacy, and now his impending presidency, have worked many people in the pro-life community into a lather. Within this community, the Catholic Church regards itself as First among equals, and continues to lead the charge in tagging anyone who is pro-choice as being pro-abortion. In a rehash of the 2004 presidential campaign, when certain American bishops refused to serve Holy Communion to pro-choice Democratic nominee John Kerry (D-MA), additional Catholic leaders have issued stern warnings to parishioners not to support Obama on the sole basis of his pro-choice stance, and to either skip communion or go to confession if any of them actually voted for him.
I continue to find it saddening, as well as more than a little insulting, to be categorized as pro-abortion by virtue of the fact that I am pro-choice. As I've written before, I don't know anybody who is pro-choice who actively and enthusiastically promotes abortions no matter the circumstances. For the majority of pro-choice citizens, the circumstances matter big time. Even those who are ardently pro-choice can find their level of support for this right challenged in the face of how different individuals choose to have an abortion, as this recent Washington Post Magazine article illustrates.
You know, opponents of the landmark Civil Rights Act were led by Senator Barry Goldwater, who argued that "you can't legislate morality." Yet these same right-wing types who opposed legislating civil rights-based morality are more than happy to support legislation that enforces their own moral code, namely the outlawing of any and all forms of abortion, no matter the circumstances. This is the very position taken by the Catholic Church, a position that has led more than one member of the U.S. Catholic priesthood to come out with outrageous edicts such as the prohibition against serving communion to Obama supporters, or demanding that parishioners who did vote for Mr. Obama go to confession in order to be absolved of this supposed sin. But honestly, would a vote for the supposedly pro-life ticket of McCain/Palin have been a vote for a reduction in the number of abortions, if not the outright elimination of this practice. I truly don't think so. In fact, since the Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973, the greatest drop in the annual number of abortions performed in the United States occurred during the administration of one William Jefferson Clinton, a pro-choice Democrat whose stated position on abortion is that it should be "safe, legal and rare." It seems that abortion is most likely to be safe, legal and rare in a country that provides for shared prosperity and a robust social safety net, progressive sex education, makes contraception and other family planning services available to all people regardless of means, and concedes that legal abortion is a medical procedure that is in fact sometimes necessary for health issues relating to the fetus, the mother, or both. The current pro-life strategy that is championed by the Catholic Church does not allow for any such circumstantial consideration. It is an approach to a highly complex social issue that is wholly lacking in nuance, and one that some Catholic leaders are finally suggesting needs to be replaced by a strategy designed to effectively address the reality of this issue as it is, not as how the Church wishes that it would be.
Where is the Gospel message of Jesus Christ in the Church's singular fixation on abortion? Does the Church really intend to mortgage the richness of its vast body of social and ethical teaching for the sake of pursuing this one particular end? It is not a reasonable, and therefore not a tenable, position for the Church to be taking. As then-candidate Obama remarked in response to a debate question on abortion,
"But there surely is some common ground when both those who believe in choice and those who are opposed to abortion can come together and say, 'We should try to prevent unintended pregnancies by providing appropriate education to our youth, communicating that sexuality is sacred and that they should not be engaged in cavalier activity, and providing options for adoption, and helping single mothers if they want to choose to keep the baby.' Those are all things that we put in the Democratic platform for the first time this year, and I think that's where we can find some common ground, because nobody's pro-abortion. I think it's always a tragic situation."
My final question: Does the Church intend to be counted among the reasonable participants in that search for common ground?
- Doug L.
PS- I usually try and limit the number of reference links to ten. However, because of the gravity of this particular issue, my thinking is that the more information that is available, the better. Please avail yourself of the resources I've assembled below. Shalom.
FOR FURTHER REFERENCE (UPDATED, December 7, 2008):
Nursing Grudges, by Dahlia Lithwick (Slate.com, December 6, 2008)
Barack Obama on Abortion (On The Issues.org)
A Hard Choice: Online Discussion with Lesley Wojcik and Patricia Meisol (WashingtonPost.com, November 24, 2008)
Maria Shriver: Pro-Choice, not pro-abortion (WashingtonPost.com, OnFaith, November 2008)
Will the Pope and Obama Clash Over Abortion? (Time.com, November 18, 2008)
Pope Says Catholics in Politics Must Follow Faith (Christianpost.com, November 16, 2008)
Obama's Promise to Pro-Lifers, by E.J. Dionne Jr. (The Washington Post, November 15, 2008)
Catholics for Obama.org
A Catholic Shift to Obama?, by E.J. Dionne Jr. (The Washington Post, October 21, 2008)
Can Democrats Reduce Abortions More Than Republicans??, by Steven Waldman (BeliefNet Blog, October 7, 2008)
Born Alive Baloney, by Jess Henig (Newsweek.com, September 24, 2008)
Obama and Infanticide (FactCheck.org, August 25, 2008)
Obama Statement on the 35th Anniversary of Roe v. Wade Decision (BarackObama.com, January 22, 2008)
Freedom of Choice Act would Guarantee Roe Protections in U.S. Statutes (National Organization for Women, April 30, 2007)
Why do women seek abortions? (ReligiousTolerance.org, April 27, 2007)
Freedom of Choice Act (U.S. Senate Version, S. 2020)
Freedom of Choice Act (U.S. House Version, H.R. 1964)
Fetal Viability, by Franklin Foer (Slate.com, May 25, 1997)
Thursday, November 27, 2008
Happy Thanksgiving!
Happy Thanksgiving, America! Eat yer turkey and giblets, then get yer gun out from the front hall closet and load'er up. The annual War on Christmas begins in 3..... 2.... 1...
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Catholics and Mormons Tag-Team CA Gays
Hooray! Catholics and Mormons have made common cause in the Great State of California to (pop quiz)...
- Help the homeless find safe, decent, affordable housing?
- Open up a statewide network of food pantries and health clinics for the poor?
- Lobby the state government for greater state assistance to California's burgeoning immigrant population?
- Engage in a Constitution-based version of Smear the Queer?
So, the Catholic Church is perfectly comfortable making common cause with the Mormon Church against the right of gay people to enter into a civil marriage, the same Mormon Church whose teachings are otherwise rejected lock, stock and barrel by the self-same Catholic Church. Given the important Constitutional ramifications of this particular Proposition and related court challenges, and given the faith-based nature of this blog, I think it's important to point out the blatant hypocrisy and cynical opportunism represented by these two religions teaming up for the express purpose of codifying discrimination against an embattled minority. I mean, excuse me, but it's not as if Catholics or Mormons have never experienced state-sponsored discrimination at any time in American history. Given the respective histories of these two faiths, you would think that their leaders (and their followers) might be more empathetic and open-minded to the issue of the legal rights of homosexuals. Oh, well. Never mind. So much for, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." I don't know how any Catholic can blithely ignore this command which cuts to the heart of the Gospel message of Jesus. Does this edict not count for Mormons since Jesus wasn't in North America when he said it? (Publisher's Note: That last comment is nothing but pure sarcasm.)
While the Catholic Archdiocese of San Francisco (o, irony of ironies!) worked directly with the Mormon Church to campaign in favor of Proposition 8, other faith-based buttinski's also sounded off in favor of state-sponsored discrimination, including:
- The Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America;
- The American Family Association; and (of course)
- Focus on the Family
As a nice post-script to this whole mess, James Dobson's Focus on the Family has had to lay off over 200 employees as a result of dumping almost three-quarters-of-a-million dollars in organization funds into the pro-Prop. 8 campaign. Talk about instant karma! Let's hope- no, let's pray- that the good karma keeps on rolling, as the California Supreme Court prepares to hear arguments challenging the validity of Proposition 8. Shalom.
- Doug L.
"Prop 8 - The Musical" (Funny or Die)
FOR FURTHER REFERENCE (UPDATED, November 24, 2008):
California to investigate Mormon aid to Prop 8 (San Francisco Chronicle, November 24, 2008)
Mormons' Uneasy Victory, by Stephen Stromberg (The Washington Post, November 24, 2008)
Bigotry on the Bus, by Dan Wentzel (The Washington Post, November 24, 2008)
Proposition 8 (2008 Voter Guide, California Secretary of State)
Catholics, Mormons allied to pass Prop. 8 (San Francisco Chronicle, November 10, 2008)
Human Rights Campaign
Advocate.com
Newt Gingrich, Divorced Lover of Family Values, Warns America of "Gay Fascism" (Gay.com, November 17, 2008)
Christian Group Lays Off Hundreds After Spending All Money on Prop 8 Passage (Wonkette.com, November 17, 2008)
Ted Haggard Opens New Business Blocks from Old Church (PageOneQ.com, November 23, 2008)
GOP leader: Rebuild party on 'sanctity of marriage' (RawStory.com, November 9, 2008)
