Follow
Register for free to receive Fr. Patrick Mary Briscoe’s My Daily Visitor newsletter and unlock full access to the latest inspirational stories, news commentary, and spiritual resources from Our Sunday Visitor.
Newsletter Magazine Subscription

My unexpected change of mind after visiting a Mormon temple

Pittsburgh Mormon temple Pittsburgh Mormon temple
Pittsburgh PA Temple - The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints | Facebook screengrab

The religion made more sense to me than it had an hour before. A few weeks ago, I toured the new Mormon temple north of Pittsburgh, getting a personal tour from the former bishop. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) opens the temples until they’re dedicated.

My guide spoke seriously about serving God and others. I was struck by how much the religion is formed around the family. That includes the promise that families will be together in the next world because they can go through the four “ordinances” of initiation for their ancestors. It’s a gospel, a good news, an answer to human suffering and death and a declaration of what they believe God has done for us.

A version of the Gospel

It’s a version of the Christian gospel. A severely deficient one — the Church doesn’t recognize Mormon baptisms, because the differences go so deep. (The Mormons agree, not recognizing Catholic baptisms either.)

But it’s not odd or weird in the way I’d been led to think by reading about the religion. In many ways, it makes sense from the inside, in the same way that Catholicism makes sense from the inside, even though skeptics mock and scoff — and for the same reasons.

Being baptized for the dead, for example, often held up as one of Mormonism’s more bizarre practices, reflects a plausible understanding of the way God connects us with others. I learned that those for whom the Mormon has gone through the initiation are offered the choice to accept it or not. They’re not dragged into heaven against their will.

The belief is as plausible as our belief that we can pray for the dead. It’s also an act of charity in the same way, a sacrifice of time and effort to affect their lives for the better. We think it’s wrong, but it’s not absurd.

I hadn’t known that and wouldn’t have but for the bishop’s invitation to see the new temple and his kindness in taking me through.

I understood what Cardinal Francis George meant when, speaking at Brigham Young University in 2010, he said, “I thank God for the harmony that has grown between us and for the possibilities of deepening our friendships through common witness and dialogue.”

Getting below the skin

“It is rare for the members of any religious body to get below the skin where any other religious body is concerned,” the Catholic spiritual writer Caryll Houselander wrote a friend. “They judge of them by a few people, usually not known intimately, and by their ceremonies.”

She’d thought she “perfectly understood” the Salvation Army because she had read a few books and gone to some meetings. Then she got to know some members well. She saw she knew almost nothing and that “it would take a lifetime to know a lot about any handful of human beings.”

She felt vexed by the way the Russian Orthodox she knew, living in London during World War II, criticized Catholicism because they didn’t understand it and judged it by their own Church’s traditions.

It’s a great human temptation to believe that we know other people more deeply and more accurately than we do. And to judge them for not being us.

I thought of this when reading a Facebook debate between a Dominican theologian and a Protestant biblical scholar who attacked Catholic belief about Mary and the devotional life that follows. He even condemned the belief that Mary is the Mother of God, despite its being the teaching of the Third Ecumenical Council.

He based his argument on a protestant idea of Scripture, asserting it as if it were self-evident. He didn’t see, or didn’t want to see, that as a Catholic the theologian sees the sources of our belief differently.

The scholar insisted that the theologian and his peers “simply misunderstand the fact that there is zero basis from the witness of Jesus and the apostles” for Catholic belief about Mary. The theologian’s argument was a “nice trick that won’t fool anyone not devoted to the Mary cult and who has a modicum of respect for the preeminence of Scripture.”

Understanding and respect

I’m not sure there’s much to say to people like him, who can’t or won’t see that other people understand the matter very differently, and think the others reject the self-evident truth. He’d claimed the Dominican was objectively wrong, but all he’d actually said is “The Dominican’s a Catholic.” And, by the way, marched into christological heresy while doing it.

As Catholics, we get this kind of treatment a lot, and not just from pertinacious Presbyterians. The least we can do is not do that to others and to go as far as we can in understanding and respecting why they believe what they do.