What may be a blow to LDS Church efforts to digitize and index historical records, the Vatican has sent a letter to diocese around the world to not share parish records with members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. From the Deseret News (May 4),
… the Vatican had "grave reservations" about the LDS Church’s practice of posthumous baptisms by proxy, a practice in which the names of the deceased are baptized into the LDS faith so that they may be united in the afterlife with LDS families, if they so choose.
The LDS Church has not made a statement yet regarding this issue.
Church spokesman Mike Otterson said the church may have more to say on the subject later in the week and that LDS officials had not yet made contact with Vatican representatives about the issue.
After having several instances where Jewish individuals have escalated concerns regarding LDS baptism of Jewish holocaust victims (see Deseret News, Dec 19 2006), this could also impact the Church’s relations with other organized religions.
From ldswebguy comes a quote from Elder M. Russell Ballard, dated April 19, 2008, as presented to the Brigham Young University Management Society in Washington, D.C.,
If a national conversation is going on about the Church, are you going to be an active participant or a silent observer?
Church leaders must not be reluctant to participate in public discussion. Where appropriate, we will engage with the media whether it’s the traditional, mainstream media or the new media of the Internet. But Church leaders can’t do it all, especially at the grass-roots, community level. While we do speak authoritatively for the Church, we look to our responsible and faithful members to engage personally with blogs, to write thoughtful, online letters to news organizations, and to act in other ways to correct the record with their own opinions.
I think that it is amazing how far the LDS Church has come with regards to the use of technology and in particular in how it encourages internet use. Those of us who have been involved in technology has seen the potential for years, but now it is really hitting the mainstream church members. It has become not only an accepted channel, but one of the primary channels for communicating to the public about what we as a Church believes.
Much the same way that various site have used GoogleMaps to create their own web content, the LDS Church has released an API to the scriptures so that this data can be redistributed and utilized for other applications. I’m excited to see more and more of these kinds of services being offered by the Church.
There is a lot of interest in the community to offer scriptures services. Here are a few that I have found:
In my last post, I mentioned that people who frequent YouTube may not know about the current efforts of the LDS Church. But did you know that the Church has a channel on YouTube since October 2007?
Elder Russell M. Nelson, one of the apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon) Introduces JesusChrist.lds.org, a new website about the Savior Jesus Christ.
In my