[Apologetics] Hide Baptism Records from Mormons, says Vatican

[Stephen Korsman]

 Hide Baptism Records from Mormons, says
Vatican<http://www.americanpapist.com/2008/05/hide-baptism-records-from-mormons-says.html>
 via AmericanPapist: Not Your Average
Catholic!<http://www.americanpapist.com/blog.html>by Thomas Peters on
5/4/08

Because aiding kooky practices doesn't help ecumenism:

In an effort to block posthumous rebaptisms by the Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints, Catholic dioceses throughout the world have been directed
by the Vatican not to give information in parish registers to the Mormons'
Genealogical Society of Utah.

An April 5 letter from the Vatican Congregation for Clergy, obtained
by Catholic
News Service <http://www.catholicnews.com/index.html> in late April, asks
episcopal conferences to direct all bishops to keep the Latter-day Saints
from microfilming and digitizing information contained in those registers.

The order came in light of "grave reservations" expressed in a Jan. 29
letter from the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the
clergy congregation's letter said.

Father James Massa, executive director of the U.S. bishops' Secretariat of
Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs, said the step was taken to prevent
the Latter-day Saints from using records -- such as baptismal documentation
-- to posthumously baptize by proxy the ancestors of church members.

Posthumous baptisms by proxy have been a common practice for the Latter-day
Saints -- commonly known as Mormons -- for more than a century, allowing the
church's faithful to have their ancestors baptized into their faith so they
may be united in the afterlife, said Mike Otterson, a spokesman in the
church's Salt Lake City headquarters

Of note:

The letter is dated 10 days before Pope Benedict XVI's April 15-20 U.S.
visit, during which he presided over an ecumenical prayer service attended
by two Mormon leaders. It marked the first time Mormons had participated in
a papal prayer service.

I don't think one need take their inclusion as any sort of endorsement. This
was an ecumenical dialogue, not an inter-christian summit. Mormon baptism is
*invalid, *which renders them non-christian.
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