Baptism for the Dead
Prophet Joseph Smith
(1805 – 1844):
“The greatest
responsibility in this world that God has laid upon us is
to seek after our dead.
-
Prophet Joseph Smith, Jr., Teachings of the
Prophet Joseph Smith,
Chapter 9, p. 356
Prophet Brigham Young
(1801 – 1877):
“This doctrine of
baptism for the dead is a great doctrine, one of the
most glorious doctrines that was ever revealed to the human family; and
there are light, power, glory, honor and immortality in it.”
-
Prophet Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses,
v. 16, p. 167
“When Joseph received
the revelation that we have in our possession
concerning the [baptism of the] dead, the subject was opened to him,
not in full but in part... Then women were baptized for men and men for
women, & c.”
-
Prophet Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses,
v. 16, pp. 165-166
Prophet Wilford
Woodruff (1807 – 1898):
“I will here say,
before closing, that two weeks before I left St.
George, the spirits of the dead gathered around me, wanting to know why
we did not redeem them. Said they, "You have had the use of the
Endowment House for a number of years, and yet nothing has ever been
done for us. We laid the foundation of the government you now enjoy,
and we never apostatized from it, but we remained true to it and were
faithful to God." There were the signers of the Declaration of
Independence, and they waited on me for two days and two nights. I
thought it very singular, that notwithstanding so much work had been
done, and yet nothing had been done for them. The thought never entered
my heart, from the fact, I suppose, that heretofore our minds were
reaching after our more immediate friends and relatives. I straightway
went into the baptismal font and called upon brother McCallister to
baptize me for the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and
fifty other eminent men, making one hundred in all, including John
Wesley, Columbus, and others; I then baptized him for every President
of the United States, except three; and when their cause is just,
somebody will do the work for them.”
-
Prophet Wilford Woodruff, Journal of Discourses,
v. 19, p. 229
Others:
“This practice
[baptism for the dead] is especially offensive to Jews.
A highly sensitive vicarious baptism issue erupted publicly in the
mid-1990s when baptism for Jewish victims of the Holocaust – some
380,000 of them – created an angry backlash from the American Gathering
of Jewish Holocaust Survivors. The names had all been submitted by nine
zealous Mormons who had visited concentration camps and Holocaust
museums in Europe. The situation surfaced when Ernest Michel, a
founding member of the survivors’ organization, discovered in the
genealogical library that his parents, both of whom died at Auschwitz,
had been given Mormon baptisms. In 1995, after a year of negotiations,
the church agreed to remove all such names and to refrain from
baptizing deceased Jews unless they were ancestors of living LDS Church
members or the church had written permission from all living members of
the person’s family.”
-
Richard and Joan Ostling, Mormon America,
pp. 189-190, see “Church to Stop Baptizing Holocaust Victims,” Sunstone,
18:3, no. 100, December 1995