A rather bizarre article if you ask me:
Apparently the Vatican has asked Catholics not to cooperate with members of the Church of Jesus Christ who are seeking information on their deceased ancestors. While they're a private institution and can do whatever they want, it's still a little odd that they would restrict people from their own ancestors, especially given the huge percentage of those who use the LDS genealogical libraries and indices who are not LDS. And it always strikes me as particularly odd that anyone cares about posthumous baptisms—I mean, if you're LDS it's a great thing, and if you're not LDS it's ridiculous and nihilo—but in no case can it be negative.
Another curious note is the Catholic News Service describing themselves as "obtaining" this letter, 3 weeks after its publication. That balance-of-power relationship is symptomatic of the modern Catholic church, and totally foreign to Mormons.
This is of course reminiscent of a similar move by the Jewish faith, who sent Hillary Clinton a few years back to "lobby" the church to stop baptizing jewish ancestors. The church of course doesn't work that way, but they did restate their counsel that church members should focus on their own lineal ancestors and therefore that there was no church program that simply harvests lists of holocaust victims for baptism.
I have no grammatical qualms with the article, but I do have a slight level of uncomfort driven by the tone, which I am reading almost as sarcastic. The author uses the phrase "allowing the church's faithful to have their ancestors baptized into their faith so they may be united in the afterlife." I'm not sure he actually equates posthumous baptisms with The Inquisition, but the phrasing there is decidedly transitive.
Christ said "except a man be born of water... he cannot enter into the kingdom of Heaven." Churches harmonize this in different ways. The Church of Jesus Christ believes that those with bodies can be baptized on behalf of those who never had the opportunity to have their own baptism. This baptism is then available for those who would choose to accept it in the afterlife. But under no permutation is it possible to change someone else's beliefs or religion through this process. Assuming all this is true, no one is arguing that a deceased Catholic who wishes to remain Catholic would be affected at all.
It should also be noted that, only 30 years ago, the Catholic church inquired after building and donating a BYU Italy for the LDS church.
"The congregation requests that the conference notifies each diocesan bishop in order to ensure that such a detrimental practice is not permitted in his territory, due to the confidentiality of the faithful and so as not to cooperate with the erroneous practices of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints."
Again it is not the place of a Catholic Bishop to permit religious practices of other faiths. He can approve or disapprove, cooperate or not, but it is disingenuous to say they have any authority over permissions. It's the repeated tone of whether to "allow" LDS baptisms that bothers me. In 2001 the Catholic church began accepting most baptisms from most religions, but still excludes LDS baptisms as non-Christian.
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