Mexican, undocumented. . .Mormon?

Fronteras ^ | April 23, 2013 | Jack Rodolic

[greyfoxx39]

Since 2000, the number of Spanish-speaking members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in the United States has doubled. Many of those Latino Mormons lack legal documentation, which poses a problem for the church.

Young Mormons are called to serve missions — two years on the road, trying to convert strangers to the faith. So what happens when Mormons without papers come of legal age, and set off on their missions?

Isaac’s story sheds some light on this quiet demographic. Isaac is his middle name. When his father, Rafael, was 17 years old in Mexico City, he got a job building a Mormon church. The local bishop took an interest in him, and they became fast friends.

“My dad decided to read the Book of Mormon and be baptized,” Isaac said.

Rafael was not alone: If the Mormon Church continues to grow at current rates, it will be majority Latin American by 2015.

Nine years later after Rafael converted, when Isaac was 18 months old, his family moved from Mexico to the U.S. When Isaac was 5, his father died in a car crash. Isaac immediately felt responsible for his mother and little sister.

“Do you see that little star?” Isaac asked his 2-year-old sister a few nights after the accident. “That’s dad. He’s watching over us right now. So don’t worry. I’m here to help you out.”

And he did. As a teenager, Isaac would slip $20 bills into his mother’s purse, money he earned mowing lawns. And when Isaac was 18, he was getting excited to set out on his Mormon mission. But then, his mother told him something completely unexpected.

“She told me, ‘I don’t know how to put this in words to you. You’re not a U.S. citizen. You are an illegal immigrant from Mexico,'" he said.

The Pew Research Center estimates there are more than 100,000 undocumented immigrants of working age in Utah, where Isaac lives. While those immigrants are filling the ranks of many churches, they are putting the Mormon church in a particularly tricky spot.

Tony Yapias is a Peruvian immigrant, a Mormon and a longtime community organizer in Salt Lake City. He says he has known hundreds of missionaries who lacked papers. The issue became critical, he says, in 2009, when immigration agents in an Ohio airport arrested a Latino missionary. “That had a profound impact in the church,” Yapias said. “It became a concern for parents, a concern for missionaries.”

The Mormon church declined to comment on this story, but it has clearly taken steps along the way to protect itself and its missionaries. In 2005, it backed an amendment by a Utah Senator to a federal law giving churches immunity for having undocumented immigrants do volunteer service, including serving missions. Over the years, the church has developed an evolving "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell" policy on its undocumented missionaries.

“When the immigration issue started heating up, at some point the church knew they were undocumented, and they knew they could no longer send them outside the country on missions," Yapais said.

So by the time Isaac went on his mission, the church was encouraging these missionaries to accept assignments in the U.S., off airplanes, within a long drive from home.

On his mission in Denver, the problems Isaac faced were less legal and more spiritual.

“I remember being rejected constantly,” he said. “It was nonstop. We’d knock on the door and they’d insult us.”

But he found an open door at the home of Guadeloupe Paredes, a Mexican Mormon immigrant who had been inactive in the church for 24 years. She let Isaac speak with her daughters, who decided to be baptized. Paredes says one day, Isaac pulled out a picture of his father. “When I saw it,” she said, “I recognized Rafael. And I said 'I know this person.'” In fact, she knew him very well back in Mexico. It turns out Paredes’ father was the Mormon bishop in Mexico City who built the church alongside Isaac’s father and baptized him.

Paredes told Isaac stories about his father. Meeting her opened up a window into his father’s life, and his faith.

“When we let fear take over us, we lose faith, and when we lose faith, we don’t have a future,” Isaac said.

Two years later, Isaac is now applying for the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. If approved, he can go to college without fear of deportation.

/div

[Elsie]

I wish you would quote from LDS Scriptures rather than plow through other writings that are not accepted as Scripture by my Church.

Your church's Practice and it's Scripture seem to be misaligned in many places...

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THE
DOCTRINE AND COVENANTS
OF THE CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF LATTER-DAY SAINTS
SECTION 89

12 Yea, flesh also of beasts and of the fowls of the air, I, the Lord, have ordained for the use of man with thanksgiving; nevertheless they are to be used sparingly;

13 And it is pleasing unto me that they should not be used, only in times of winter, or of cold, or famine.

[ejonesie22]

Sorry D13, but you are mistaken. If you indeed truly follow the ideals and doctrine of the LDS your "prophets" words are scripture.

From your churches' very on web site:

Words of Our Living Prophets

In addition to these four books of scripture, the inspired words of our living prophets become scripture to us. Their words come to us through conferences, the Liahona or Ensign magazine, and instructions to local priesthood leaders. “We believe all that God has revealed, all that He does now reveal, and we believe that He will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining to the Kingdom of God” (Articles of Faith 1:9).

So as I was saying, are you throwing your "prophets" under the bus in order to make a weak argument...

[svcw]

Please show me which quotes are untrue, thank you

[Elsie]

So as I was saying, are you throwing your "prophets" under the bus in order to make a weak argument...

Well; the PROPHETS have thrown their GOD under the bus; so this is a piddling affair.

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    OFFICIAL DECLARATION—1

To Whom It May Concern:

Press dispatches having been sent for political purposes, from Salt Lake City, which have been widely published, to the effect that the Utah Commission, in their recent report to the Secretary of the Interior, allege that plural marriages are still being solemnized and that forty or more such marriages have been contracted in Utah since last June or during the past year, also that in public discourses the leaders of the Church have taught, encouraged and urged the continuance of the practice of polygamy—

I, therefore, as President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, do hereby, in the most solemn manner, declare that these charges are false. We are not teaching polygamy or plural marriage, nor permitting any person to enter into its practice, and I deny that either forty or any other number of plural marriages have during that period been solemnized in our Temples or in any other place in the Territory.

One case has been reported, in which the parties allege that the marriage was performed in the Endowment House, in Salt Lake City, in the Spring of 1889, but I have not been able to learn who performed the ceremony; whatever was done in this matter was without my knowledge. In consequence of this alleged occurrence the Endowment House was, by my instructions, taken down without delay.

Inasmuch as laws have been enacted by Congress forbidding plural marriages, which laws have been pronounced constitutional by the court of last resort, I hereby declare my intention to submit to those laws, and to use my influence with the members of the Church over which I preside to have them do likewise.

There is nothing in my teachings to the Church or in those of my associates, during the time specified, which can be reasonably construed to inculcate or encourage polygamy; and when any Elder of the Church has used language which appeared to convey any such teaching, he has been promptly reproved. And I now publicly declare that my advice to the Latter-day Saints is to refrain from contracting any marriage forbidden by the law of the land.

WILFORD WOODRUFF
President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

 

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President Lorenzo Snow offered the following:

“I move that, recognizing Wilford Woodruff as the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the only man on the earth at the present time who holds the keys of the sealing ordinances, we consider him fully authorized by virtue of his position to issue the Manifesto which has been read in our hearing, and which is dated September 24th, 1890, and that as a Church in General Conference assembled, we accept his declaration concerning plural marriages as authoritative and binding.”

The vote to sustain the foregoing motion was unanimous.

Salt Lake City, Utah, October 6, 1890.

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EXCERPTS FROM THREE ADDRESSES BY
PRESIDENT WILFORD WOODRUFF
REGARDING THE MANIFESTO

The Lord will never permit me or any other man who stands as President of this Church to lead you astray. It is not in the programme. It is not in the mind of God. If I were to attempt that, the Lord would remove me out of my place, and so He will any other man who attempts to lead the children of men astray from the oracles of God and from their duty. (Sixty-first Semiannual General Conference of the Church, Monday, October 6, 1890, Salt Lake City, Utah. Reported in Deseret Evening News, October 11, 1890, p. 2.)

It matters not who lives or who dies, or who is called to lead this Church, they have got to lead it by the inspiration of Almighty God. If they do not do it that way, they cannot do it at all. . . .

I have had some revelations of late, and very important ones to me, and I will tell you what the Lord has said to me. Let me bring your minds to what is termed the manifesto. . . .

The Lord has told me to ask the Latter-day Saints a question, and He also told me that if they would listen to what I said to them and answer the question put to them, by the Spirit and power of God, they would all answer alike, and they would all believe alike with regard to this matter.

The question is this: Which is the wisest course for the Latter-day Saints to pursue—to continue to attempt to practice plural marriage, with the laws of the nation against it and the opposition of sixty millions of people, and at the cost of the confiscation and loss of all the Temples, and the stopping of all the ordinances therein, both for the living and the dead, and the imprisonment of the First Presidency and Twelve and the heads of families in the Church, and the confiscation of personal property of the people (all of which of themselves would stop the practice); or, after doing and suffering what we have through our adherence to this principle to cease the practice and submit to the law, and through doing so leave the Prophets, Apostles and fathers at home, so that they can instruct the people and attend to the duties of the Church, and also leave the Temples in the hands of the Saints, so that they can attend to the ordinances of the Gospel, both for the living and the dead?

The Lord showed me by vision and revelation exactly what would take place if we did not stop this practice. If we had not stopped it, you would have had no use for . . . any of the men in this temple at Logan; for all ordinances would be stopped throughout the land of Zion. Confusion would reign throughout Israel, and many men would be made prisoners. This trouble would have come upon the whole Church, and we should have been compelled to stop the practice. Now, the question is, whether it should be stopped in this manner, or in the way the Lord has manifested to us, and leave our Prophets and Apostles and fathers free men, and the temples in the hands of the people, so that the dead may be redeemed. A large number has already been delivered from the prison house in the spirit world by this people, and shall the work go on or stop? This is the question I lay before the Latter-day Saints. You have to judge for yourselves. I want you to answer it for yourselves. I shall not answer it; but I say to you that that is exactly the condition we as a people would have been in had we not taken the course we have.

. . . I saw exactly what would come to pass if there was not something done. I have had this spirit upon me for a long time. But I want to say this: I should have let all the temples go out of our hands; I should have gone to prison myself, and let every other man go there, had not the God of heaven commanded me to do what I did do; and when the hour came that I was commanded to do that, it was all clear to me. I went before the Lord, and I wrote what the Lord told me to write. . . .

I leave this with you, for you to contemplate and consider. The Lord is at work with us.

(Cache Stake Conference, Logan, Utah, Sunday, November 1, 1891. Reported in Deseret Weekly, November 14, 1891.)

 

 

 

Now I will tell you what was manifested to me and what the Son of God performed in this thing. . . . All these things would have come to pass, as God Almighty lives, had not that Manifesto been given. Therefore, the Son of God felt disposed to have that thing presented to the Church and to the world for purposes in his own mind. The Lord had decreed the establishment of Zion. He had decreed the finishing of this temple. He had decreed that the salvation of the living and the dead should be given in these valleys of the mountains. And Almighty God decreed that the Devil should not thwart it. If you can understand that, that is a key to it.

 

(From a discourse at the sixth session of the dedication of the Salt Lake Temple, April 1893. Typescript of Dedicatory Services, Archives, Church Historical Department, Salt Lake City, Utah.)

 

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What kind of  'Leadership' is THIS???

 

compared to...

 

 

 

 

Hebrews 11:35-40
 35.  Others were tortured and refused to be released, so that they might gain a better resurrection.
 36.  Some faced jeers and flogging, while still others were chained and put in prison.
 37.  They were stoned ; they were sawed in two; they were put to death by the sword. They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted and mistreated--
 38.  the world was not worthy of them. They wandered in deserts and mountains, and in caves and holes in the ground. 
 

 

or compared to...

 

Acts 4:19.  But Peter and John replied, "Judge for yourselves whether it is right in God's sight to obey you rather than God.

 

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So much for an 'Everlasting Covenant' that thundered out of Heaven!!!

 

Well; it DID last about 47 years!

 

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Inasmuch as laws have been enacted by Congress forbidding plural marriage...

I hereby declare my intention to submit to those laws..."

~ Wilford Woodruff, 4th LDS President

 

[reaganaut]

The quotes are acurate and in context, look them up. They are also from LDS sources. Mormonism is its own worst enemy.

[reaganaut]

She asked for it (literally). She wasn’t banned, she opused out, but she keeps lying and saying she was run off the page.

You can ask JR.

[svcw]

Oh, she knows...why she is no longer here under the other name