Religion: Mormon Mixup

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormons) takes itself very seriously as an international organization—though all but 70,000 of its 892,000 members live in the U.S. And to Mormons the utterances of their First Presidency (President Heber Jedediah Grant and his two counselors) are a divinely inspired part of the continuous revelations of God. These two facts last week produced a First Presidency message to the semiannual Mormon conference at Salt Lake City whose impartial stand on the war closely resembled the attitude of the Pope:

“. . . We must call upon the leaders of nations to abandon the fiendishly inspired slaughter. … We condemn the outcome which wicked and designing men are now planning, namely: the world-wide establishment and perpetuation of some, form of communism on the one side, or some form of nazism or fascism on the other. … We call upon the statesmen of the world to … bring this war to an end honorable and just to all.”

As 85-year-old President Grant has long been ill, most Mormons decided that this revelation came from the man who read it to the conference—First Counselor J. Reuben Clark Jr., onetime Hoover Ambassador to Mexico and a last-ditch isolationist before Pearl Harbor. Next day this impression was strengthened when disagreement in the First Presidency itself became evident. Said Second Counselor David 0. McKay in a national broadcast: “The conflict must continue. … We cannot have peace until the mad gangsters … are defeated and branded as murderers, their false aims repudiated, and this war against wickedness ended.”

Meanwhile the average Mormon, who is fighting as hard for his country as anybody else, might draw what comfort he could from the fact that his church once more (after a ten-year lapse) has a Presiding Patriarch. For this sole Mormon hereditary position the conference last week chose Joseph F. Smith, great-grandson of Founder Joseph Smith’s brother Hyrum, who was killed by the same Illinois mob that lynched Joseph in 1844.* The new patriarch is 43, father of five, heads the University of Utah’s phonetic department and is one of the best amateur actors in Salt Lake City. His patriarchal duties include pronouncing blessings upon the heads of church members.

*All the direct descendants of Founder Joseph followed his widow Emma into the reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (140,000 members) with headquarters at Independence, Mo. They still hotly insist that Joseph had only one wifeinstead of the 28 claimed for him by Utah Mormons, ask why, if he had five children by Emma,he had none by the other 27.