Word: mormon
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...when he became president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints-by Mormon definition, their "prophet, seer and revelator." That was well past the age when many Protestant church leaders retire, even past the recommended retirement age (75) that Pope Paul VI has set down for Roman Catholic bishops. But when he died last week of acute heart congestion at the age of 96, even his final years of feebleness could not dim the conviction that David O. McKay had done more in his 19-year tenure to change the image and direction of the Mormon Church...
Reviewing his life in 1968, McKay suggested that his greatest achievement was to have made the church a worldwide organization. During his presidency, the Mormon rolls expanded from just over 1,000,000 to 2,815,000. He opened five new Temples: in Oakland, Los Angeles, New Zealand, Switzerland and London. The Temples -not to be confused with lower-ranking Mormon meeting houses-enabled Europeans for the first time to perform the sacred Mormon Temple rites, such as "endowment" (a vow to live church principles) or "sealing" of marriages "for time and eternity," without traveling to North America. Missions grew...
Global Thinking. David Oman McKay was the grandson of Scottish and Welsh immigrants, Mormon converts, who settled in Utah in the mid-19th century. Born near Ogden on a farm that he maintained until his death, McKay followed his father, a farmer-teacher, into education. But a turn as a church missionary in Scotland involved him ever after in church affairs, and by 1906, at the age of 32, he was called to membership in the Council of the Twelve Apostles, the church's governing body...
...himself assiduously to church work, rising daily at 4 a.m. for a period of contemplation before striding over to the church offices. A 13-month, 63,000-mile tour of mission territories in the late 1920s set the pattern of his global thinking; terms as Counselor to two successive Mormon presidents, Heber J. Grant and George Albert Smith, brought him more and more into top-level decisions. When Smith died in 1951, McKay became ninth president of the church and, according to Mormon theology, the only man on earth who can be "the living oracle...
Since those who are barred from the priesthood cannot marry or be "sealed" in Mormon temples, few Negroes bother to belong to the Mormon church at all. Mormons, however, do believe that revelation is a continuing process, and their leaders have predicted that a revelation will one day open the priesthood to Negroes-just as a revelation ended polygamy during a critical confrontation with the U.S. Government in the past century...