Baptize everybody!
The Catholic Church has ordered dioceses across the globe not to give information in parish registers to members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, aka Mormons.
Catholics told not to give LDS parish data
You see, Mormons perform ordinances for people that have died that they consider essential for salvation. They have someone, often an ancestor; stand in as “proxy” for that dead person.
For example, according to the New Testament Jesus taught that you had to be born of water to enter the kingdom of heaven. Many people, including the LDS Church, interpret this to mean baptism. So, if you need to be baptized to get to heaven, then what about all of those people that died without being baptized?
You might hear a variety of answers to that question depending on who you are asking, but the LDS Church has a brilliant solution, baptize everybody!
This “baptism for the dead” is performed in various LDS Temples around the world, and as people do genealogy work they submit their ancestors’ names to have the temple work done of them. There are more ordinances performed besides baptism, that it is the most well known one since it is mentioned in the New Testament.
This desire to do temple work for ancestors is part of the reason why the LDS are well known for being so diligent in doing genealogy; in fact the LDS Church has proven to be a valuable resource for genealogical data and stores back-ups of it in a mountain side in Utah, where it can be protected for a millennia.
They have gotten into trouble before with their temple ordinances for the dead; at one point various Jewish groups were upset about Holocaust victims having the work done for them.
Usually the work is done for a direct ancestor, which gives it more legitimacy as far as having the authority to submit that person’s name.
With this recent news from the Catholic Church, it seems that some genealogical research performed by Latter-day saints, regardless of its purpose, may be more difficult to do in the future.
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