Free Republic

Ex-Mormon Australia native Helen Radkey is a spiritual consultant and educator, soul reader, past-life therapist, prayer therapist, marriage celebrant, writer and researcher, but is best known as that rabble-rouser who’s been keeping close tabs on the LDS Church’s temple ordinances for the past 18 years. City Weekly caught up with Radkey to find out what she's been keeping tabs on lately. Why do proxy baptisms matter to people who don’t believe in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? Alive or dead, people deserve to be treated with respect. Proxy baptism is a disrespectful attempt to reframe a person’s...

It's never too late for a soul to be Mormon. Since 1840, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have been encouraged to perform baptisms in temples for their deceased relatives. However, the Mormon baptism of hundreds of thousands of Jewish Holocaust victims created a 15-year controversy for the Salt Lake City-based church. On Sept. 1, the church made an agreement with Jewish leaders, acknowledging that the practice had "unintentionally caused pain," with an LDS pledge to American Jewish leaders to stop the practice. Yet church critics say it's easier said than done, and the Holocaust exception...

Here's your history lesson for the day. October 3rd 1918, then LDS Church President Joseph F. Smith received a vision regarding the redemption of the dead. The next day at General Conference, “President Smith declared that he had received several divine communications during the previous months. One of these, concerning the Savior’s visit to the spirits of the dead while his body was in the tomb, he had received the previous day. It was written immediately following the close of the conference; on October 31, 1918, it was submitted to the counselors in the First Presidency, the Council of the...

Mormons believe that the higher level of salvation, or exaltation, a person earns after their time on Earth determines the extent of their power and responsibilities throughout eternity. Temple ceremonies on earth are connected to the Mormon view of the hereafter. As can be expected, energetic Mormons have done temple work for just about all of the U.S. presidents and even founding fathers. For a long time, there was one key exception: the eighth U.S. president, Martin Van Buren. Although it wasn’t true, I was told as a child by more than one adult LDS Church member that temple ceremonies...

"Millions of ordinances are performed in the temples each year in behalf of our deceased loved ones. May we continue to be faithful in performing such ordinances for those who are unable to do so for themselves. I love the words of President Joseph F. Smith as he spoke of temple service and of the spirit world beyond mortality. Said he, 'Through our efforts in their behalf their chains of bondage will fall from them, and the darkness surrounding them will clear away, that light may shine upon them and they shall hear in the spirit world of the work...

Hail Holy QueenMary (the mother of Jesus) was a Jewish woman of Nazareth in Galilee, identified in the New Testament as the wife of Joseph and the mother of Jesus of Nazareth. Christians believe Mary conceived Jesus miraculously by the agency of the Holy Spirit. For twenty centuries, Christians have cherished Mary and given her titles that reflect their love and admiration—such as the Blessed Virgin Mary, Theotokos (Mother of God), Our Lady, and Queen of Heaven. As the most celebrated woman in Christendom, Mary is considered the epitome of virtue by Christians, especially Catholics and Orthodox. Protestants generally perceive...

Helen Radkey sits in her tiny Millcreek apartment amid images of Buddha and Egyptian sun gods, good-luck charms, sacred texts, tarot cards and a makeshift shrine to a Catholic saint, complete with a relic. Her refrigerator is awash in photos of children, grandchildren and friends from around the country and across the globe. Both bedrooms are piled high with box after box of file folders, evidence of her decadeslong drive to undermine the LDS Church's temple ritual in which living Mormons are baptized for a person who has died. Each folder contains the name and personal information of an individual...

The LDS Church now has in place a computer program it believes may halt -- or at least slow -- the submission of incorrect, inappropriate or dubious information into its massive collection of genealogical records. "The new version of FamilySearch is a technological deterrent to improper submissions," LDS spokesman Scott Trotter said Thursday. "For example, users must certify that the names they are submitting are of family members." Mormons submit the lion's share of the historical data, either from private or public sources, typed singly or "extracted" from a list. Thousands of names are entered into the system every day...

Two stories published in The Salt Lake Tribune this week, as a British friend of mine would say, put the cat among the pigeons. The first story reported that members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints baptized a recently canonized Roman Catholic saint by proxy and sealed him to a wife for eternity. "Father Damien, the Roman Catholic priest who cared for lepers in Hawaii in the 19th century, apparently is a saint twice over," Kristen Moulton wrote. " ... There is no evidence Damien ever married, which would have been a violation of his vow of...

Father Damien, the Roman Catholic priest who cared for lepers in Hawaii in the 19th century, apparently is a saint twice over. Damien, who was born Joseph De Veuster in Belgium, was canonized a saint by Pope Benedict XVI on Sunday in Rome. But Helen Radkey, a critic of the Salt Lake City-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, said Monday that research shows Mormons have both baptized Damien by proxy and "sealed" him for eternity to a wife named Marie Damien. There is no evidence Damien ever married, which would have been a violation of his vow of...

The media continues to treat a genealogical researcher as a celebrity. Helen Radkey likes to unearth misguided proxy baptisms performed by LDS Church members... She has made it her vocation to research and then release her sensationalized findings to the media. The media in turn often print whatever Radkey has to say, drop in a quote from church public affairs and call it good journalism... SNIP While Radkey's facts may be accurate, it's her spin that often goes unchallenged. As a member of the church, I find it disheartening that fellow members would submit names of unrelated people, including Holocaust...

As a former Mormon...I had to address the recent news story about the proxy baptism of President Obama’s dead mother... Church officials are now stating that it is not the practice of the LDS church to perform such proxy baptism without family members’ permission. That is, at best, disingenuous and, at worst, an outright lie. Until 1995, LDS church members could submit names of any deceased person for proxy baptism, even in the absence of any relationship. In 1995, Jewish groups became rightly outraged when they discovered that Mormons were posthumously baptizing Jewish Holocaust victims into the LDS church. At...

If I can believe all the "check is in the mail" response I got to last week's column offering excommunication for the dead for those who are unhappy that Mormons baptized their dead relatives, I am well on my way to becoming a millionaire. E-mail orders poured in from people anxious to ensure that their ancestors didn't become the Mormon undead through proxy baptism. My grandfather's name is Ed. Please commit adultery in your heart for him with Dolly Parton. Sweet. I want a franchise when you're up and running. What about stock? You got competition, dude. I'll do the...

SALT LAKE CITY (ABC 4 News) - President Barack Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, was baptized posthumously in a temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. An ordinance record obtained from the LDS Church’s family search website shows that the ordinance work was performed in the Provo temple last June – right in the middle of the presidential campaign. Helen Radkey, a, genealogical researcher, former Mormon and self-described minister, found the record last week while doing work at the LDS Church’s Family History Library. Radkey said, “I was mildly surprised because it seemed as though she was...