You can’t read or watch the news this last week without a Pope update. He went into the hospital last week with bronchitis, then developed double pneumonia. We get daily updates: the Vatican said Pope Francis “had a tranquil night, woke up and had breakfast,” last Wednesday. Yesterday he was not doing so well again.
Even when the Pope is in better health, every time he misses an engagement, the Vatican will tell us why (did not sleep well, had a cough, a high fever, etc).
Let’s contrast that with the LDS Church and its leader, Pres Russel Nelson. When was the last time he was seen by the public? Last fall? How is he doing this week? Has he been in the hospital at anytime during the past several months? Do we even need to know? Is it a big deal if we don’t know anything about his well being? Well, if he is the only person on the Earth authorized to exercise all priesthood keys, then yes, it is a big deal how healthy he is to carry this out! These keys just don’t exercise themselves!
So why do you think there is such a big difference between the Catholic Church and the Mormon Church with regard to the health of their leader? I think one reason is that unlike the Catholic Church, The Mormons have 15 Popes. If Nelson can’t show up for a Temple dedication, or Christmas devotional, or Easter message, then one of the other 15 Apostles (Popes) can just fill in without anybody even noticing. But when the Catholic Pope misses Easter services, it is a big deal. Last week Pres Oaks gave the Easter message in a recorded presentation. While I’m sure a few members wondered why it wasn’t Nelson, it is so common now to not see a Prophet for weeks or months that it was not a big deal.
Another reason is that we have placed all our eggs on one basket. That basket is revelation, and there are 15 eggs in that basket, but one is bigger and better than the rest, and the other 14 eggs can’t reveal or give prophesy for the whole church unless the big egg gives his approval. If the prophet (the big egg) is too sick to reveal or prophesize, then it doesn’t get done. That is untenable for the Church, as witnessed to what happened when Pres Benson had dementia. The signature machine still turned out missionary callings and Bishop certificates by the dozens each day with ETB’s signature on them. You know the Prophet called you on a mission, he signed it right here! He was propped up in a chair to make it looked like he was participating. ETB’s grandson Steve spilled the beans in a newspaper article.
Why do you think the Church is so guarded about the Prophet’s health? Is it really none of our business? Or is it all of our business as members of the Church?
Wheat & Tares 
It’s funny, my sister and I were just talking about this exact topic yesterday. Years ago I lived in a ward in Maryland that was quite close geographically to NSA and we had a large number of members who worked there. For several years, the bishop in that ward was an NSA employee. It was frustrating because all information was kept tightly within the leadership circle. Or you could choose to look at it like this: only those who were authorized by their calling (or their spouses) knew anything. It was alienating, but most members accept this kind of behavior, and it wasn’t that much more than how the overall church operates.
The church as a whole is incredibly secretive. This example concerns the health of the top honcho. If you look at the church as a whole, they do not share a vast amount of information, this is just one item. Two major areas where they don’t share information include statistics and financial data. For statistics, it’s a variety of things, chief among them activity rates and voluntary resignations. For financial data, that includes everything from salaries of GAs to a breakdown of charitable donations (how much of stated donations are from fast offerings, value of service hours, or the actual value of actual donations from the hoard). This list of mysteries is long, though there are many who make a concerted effort to try and figure out reasonable approximations.
I think as a church, the members look at the top leader differently than Catholics look at the pope. As inferred, members consider the Q15 as interchangeable, even while acknowledging that one is more important at the moment. There isn’t mystery and drama when one dies – everyone knows what’s going to happen next. The church has shown that if the top man is incapacitated, operations will continue as scheduled and no one will be the wiser. It can even be an opportunity to push an agenda that wouldn’t otherwise have passed (POX). The members have been well trained in accepting secrecy. Catholics revere the Pope (although prophet worship is gaining traction and the church might not be that far behind in that regard.) Members have already formed attachments to the other Q14, but they’re more pragmatic in their devotion and easily accept the new leader. Perhaps the big difference between the two situations is that members know who is next, where there is mystery and uncertainty with a new Pope. Catholics have not had 30 to 40 years to get to know their new leader and form emotional attachments.
There are no official statements on President Nelson’s health, but I have had two different occasions in the last month or two where I have been in meetings involving mid-level church leaders (seventies), and both made it a point to say that he’s mentally sharp and definitely totally with it and is intimately familiar with what we are all dealing with and sends his love etc. I feel like there is always this effort to portray the President of the Church as well as other members of the Q15 as functioning at a high level even when they are clearly not. I don’t understand this. We are supposed to believe that a leader is completely capable of and executing all that’s need to run the church when they aren’t seen in months, and apparently are not even up to sitting through general conference in public. Most recently President Oaks was the one who pre-recorded an Easter message, which tells me President Nelson is not even well enough to do that. All the hiding and secrecy just seems so counterproductive. They really seem to feel something awful would happen if they were just honest about their own human limitations.
This would be a good time to remember the old saying:
“Catholics say the pope is infallible but don’t really believe it; Mormons say the prophet is fallible but don’t really believe it.”
A good discussion of this can be found a few places online, with just a few referenced below:
Holly Welker MARCH 24, 2014 “THE MORMON VERSION OF INFALLIBILITY” on Religion Dispatches
“President Nelson and the Problem of Prophetic Infallibility” on By Common Consent Blog October 18, 2018 by T.L. Peterson
It’s curious that with an actual doctrine of infallibility the Catholics are still able to understand the reality of human frailties in their highest leader.
Building off @anon. One of my coworkers is an active staunch Catholic. He has never cared for Pope Francis or his policies. He will actively criticize him in public. His faith in Catholicism is not based on the current leadership. Once Pope Francis passes on, his faith will continue on unaffected. Here is a blog within their community: https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/should-we-criticize-pope-francis-or-not-if-so-howpart-3-caveats/
Within the LDS community, once you have stated any minor, tiny criticism you are on the road to apostasy and out of the church. We have these discussions in the ex-LDS community, but they are non-existent within the TBM group. Imagine if during a hallway chitchat, someone is overhead saying “yeah, I do not like the POX policy that Pres Nelson implemented”.
This may not be the best example, but I remember not liking statistics. Was the problem the material, the professor, or the student? Sometimes with a different teaching approach with different professor we understand the concepts better and progress in our learning; so the professor’s approach with that particular student did not work. Sometimes retaking the class 3x, despite being a stellar student in every other subject, indicates the problem is the material not meshing with the student. The answer is consider a different major, and that is why we should try different classes to assess our aptitudes before a final career choice. If the problem is the student, they will eventually fail out of multiple courses and leave school. In Mormonism, the problem never can be the material or the leaders approach, it is always the students fault.
Hence, if you were taught to follow the single prophet and he is not available, you should not question the material or seek another teacher. Wait for him to die and his replacement is around the calendar. But if you leave without the chance of another competent teacher, or a chance to change a majors (another path toward God), it is your fault and not the institution’s. We need pull back the curtain and realize that OZ is not a wizard. But in the book he admits to being a humbug and provides the group personal wishes and tokens in appreciation. The current church hides the Q15 behind such a tight curtain, few have access. However, the internet has put a lot of holes in the curtain for those who want to look behind the scenes.
One of my final straws, 15 years ago, was early morning seminary, it is too early, too every thing type of program. I questioned the system and such with a lot of push back. Now seeing that RFK is advising the federal government to push back school starting times and is 5 steps ahead of the Q15, who hide behind their curtain, who get their sleep and comfort, makes me so angry and seeing the effects on my kids now 15 years later, I wished I would have changed majors and professors before my kids were born.
Building off @anon. One of my coworkers is an active staunch Catholic. He has never cared for Pope Francis or his policies. He will actively criticize him in public. His faith in Catholicism is not based on the current leadership. Once Pope Francis passes on, his faith will continue on unaffected. Here is a blog within their community: https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/should-we-criticize-pope-francis-or-not-if-so-howpart-3-caveats/
Within the LDS community, once you have stated any minor, tiny criticism you are on the road to apostasy and out of the church. We have these discussions in the ex-LDS community, but they are non-existent within the TBM group. Imagine if during a hallway chitchat, someone is overhead saying “yeah, I do not like the POX policy that Pres Nelson implemented”.
This may not be the best example, but I remember not liking statistics. Was the problem the material, the professor, or the student? Sometimes with a different teaching approach with different professor we understand the concepts better and progress in our learning; so the professor’s approach with that particular student did not work. Sometimes retaking the class 3x, despite being a stellar student in every other subject, indicates the problem is the material not meshing with the student. The answer is consider a different major, and that is why we should try different classes to assess our aptitudes before a final career choice. If the problem is the student, they will eventually fail out of multiple courses and leave school. In Mormonism, the problem never can be the material or the leaders approach, it is always the students fault.
Hence, if you were taught to follow the single prophet and he is not available, you should not question the material or seek another teacher. Wait for him to die and his replacement is around the calendar. But if you leave without the chance of another competent teacher, or a chance to change a majors (another path toward God), it is your fault and not the institution’s. We need pull back the curtain and realize that OZ is not a wizard. But in the book he admits to being a humbug and provides the group personal wishes and tokens in appreciation. The current church hides the Q15 behind such a tight curtain, few have access. However, the internet has put a lot of holes in the curtain for those who want to look behind the scenes.
One of my final straws, 15 years ago, was early morning seminary, it is too early, too every thing type of program. I questioned the system and such with a lot of push back. Now seeing that RFK is advising the federal government to push back school starting times and is 5 steps ahead of the Q15, who hide behind their curtain, who get their sleep and comfort, makes me so angry and seeing the effects on my kids now 15 years later, I wished I would have changed majors and professors before my kids were born.
I think the biggest difference is the Catholic Church treats is members as adults, while the Mormon church treats its members like small children. Parents are not supposed to burden small children with all adult worries. Small children are supposed to be able to just trust their parents to make important decisions and handle the hard stuff.
Anon makes a good point: “It’s curious that with an actual doctrine of infallibility the Catholics are still able to understand the reality of human frailties in their highest leader.” As I understand it, the Catholics only take the pope to be infallible when he speaks “ex cathedra” or from the chair. No one takes every word from the pope to be infallible, but when he speaks from the throne, he declares that he is speaking from the throne so there is no confusion. He doesn’t speak from the throne just because he is seated in a big chair. The pope is infallible only in rare and limited circumstances, and only twice in recent history: in 1854 on the immaculate conception of Mary and in 1950 on the bodily assumption of Mary into heaven. Papal infallibility is very, very rare. In Catholicism,
LDS prophet infallibility, on the other hand, is officially disclaimed but is widely preached, even by those in the Q15, and is widely believed and widely imposed as an article of faith in our weekly classes and lessons. We repeat the teaching that the Lord will never allow this church to be led into apostasy, and we teach this doctrine to mean that no person, from the president of the church all the way down to a bishop, can err when acting officially. This is balderdash. An individual leader can teach falsely and the whole church does not go into apostasy. The whole church can believe a false doctrine and the whole church does not go into apostasy, particularly if the doctrine in question isn’t key (key meaning things like God was made flesh and dwelt among us, and died for our sins, and rose again on the third day, and restored the gospel in the latter days). For example, we used to teach that cremation was bad, but this false teaching didn’t put the whole church in apostasy; at some point in the recent past there was a course correction and our teaching on cremation changed. To have criticized the ban on cremation while the teaching was in place might have been seen as individual apostasy and might have been an excommunicable offense. We used to tell women to wear her garment top under her bra, not over; this teaching, while real, wasn’t key, although many members cannot tell the difference between key and not key. Pres. Oaks, reaffirming infallibility, recently taught something to the effect that there isn’t a difference between key and not key: if it comes from the church leadership on any topic whatsoever, it is apostasy to teach anything else. I may have misinterpreted his teaching, so apologies if I have misrepresented him. The Catholics have long allowed for different beliefs on different non-key topics, and there are few things where one can correctly declare that all faithful Catholics believe x or y.
I think Catholics care more about hearing details about the pope because he is a head of state, but also because the Catholic faithful want to know about him so that they can pray personally and directly for his ailments. This is done out of love for him. Latter-day Saints love their leader, also, but he isn’t a head of state. We don’t treat him as a king. The other reason: there are over a billion Catholics in the world, and only a few (comparatively speaking) Latter-day Saints, so there isn’t a market in the press for news about the leader of the Mormon faith.
It wouldn’t and shouldn’t be any of our business but they make it our business. They should be able to enjoy their twilight years in peace doing the things they enjoy.
Except… they set policy and insist we call them prophets, seers, and revelators. They are propped up in the big chairs at conference for all to see and claim to be fine from the neck up. Their lesser peers venerate them and enable them machine signing documents. We have every right to speculate and question their health and mental capacity because they impact us real ways from 10% of our income to what underwear we wear.
The Arab scholar and religious leader Ali Bin Abi-Taleb once said that keeping one’s distance from an ignorant person is equivalent to keeping company with a wise man. This quote is directly applicable to this situation.
We are warned in the BoM about saying or thinking “All is Well” yet, with the lack of transparency in the church for so many things, we live in a constant state of “All is well.” And why not. If the prophet dies, we know who is going to replace him. There is no drama. The Lord made his choice years ago when they were put on the Q12 and the rest was left up to genetics.
Catholics, on the other hand, have no idea who the next Pope will be. All they know is it will be a decision of the school of Cardinals (not all Cardinals just certain ones) and they will argue and debate in secret, take a vote, and send up in smoke if they agree on someone. There might be favorites on who it will be but know one really knows until it’s announced.
So LDS who say they don’t believe in foreordination or predestination actually practice a form of it in how they choose their next prophet while the Catholics who say they believe in foreordination/predestination actually choose their leader in the moment based on current needs and the people in the chosen circle to decide.
So I guess LDS don’t really care about their prophets health because they know what’s going to happen already and they already know that day to day affairs of the church are conducted by myriads of others, not the prophet. Catholics care about the Pope’s health because they don’t know who is going to be next or what changes will happen because of a new pope. LDS members will allow changes with a new prophet to be God’s will and that prophets mission while Catholics will challenge future changes because of the Pope’s personal beliefs either conservative or liberal, theological or social.
I recently heard a brilliant quote that applies here: “The Potemkin Village of prophet infallibility.”
Imagine a counterfactual in which the next leader was either an unknown quantity or known to be completely different in focus from Nelson. There would be a whole lot more anxiety right now. The MAGA cohort (clearly the majority) think Nelson is the bee’s knees because he more or less shares their worldview (except vaccines). They like Oaks even more. There aren’t many (any?) who have a worldview shared by progressives. The closest is Uchtdorf who is completely sidelined and not in the immediate succession. If Nelson dies, Oaks is probably going to be even worse for anyone who is not MAGA or who cares about LGBTQ people, and he made a joke out of women who were upset about eternal polygamy. These aren’t empathetic people. When Oaks succeeds Nelson, it’s more of the same, but by the time they are both gone will there be any non-MAGA members left? I’m not sure. Both Gong and Stevenson attended Trump’s inaugural, so they are clearly cut from the same cloth.
Two misc. comments:
In 6 weeks we will get a chance to see if he is well enough to sit in a chair for two straight hours. And if so, how many times can he do that in one weekend? (I’ll put the betting line at 1 session. Who wants the over?)
The church doesn’t want the presidents health to be an issue, because it becomes a never ending issue. Bednar is possibly the last guy who has a shot at being president of the church before turning 80. (It’s been 50 years since we had a 79 year old leading the church.) In the last 500 years the Catholics haven’t picked a single pope in his 80s.
Baring a fundamental change to the way the church is run, the next 50 years will nearly always have a president of the church who is 90+, and based on my experience with nonagenarians, there are far more bad days than good ones.
Loudlysunlime, your Potemkin village comment made me laugh out loud. Thanks. After the last month I have needed a good belly laugh. For anyone who doesn’t know what a Potemkin village is back in the 18th century Russian nobleman Grigori Potemkin built facades of prosperous villages to hide the actual grinding poverty of the people so that when the Empress Catherine the Great went on trips around Russia she would think that her citizens were prospering and happy when the opposite was the truth. The term has come to mean in Mormon parlance “All is well in Zion. Zion prospereth.”
My mom was a a carer for President Benson and his wife back during his presidency. She made it sound like pearls of wisdom continually dropped from his mouth and that he was as mentally sharp as a 20 year old. One weekend when I was visiting my parents Mom came home from babysitting the Bensons and was thoroughly frazzled. Of course, she wouldn’t say anything in front on my sibs that were still at home and me, but we could hear her through a heating vent tell my dad how bad the situation was. Sister Benson’s Alzheimer’s was very advanced and she had become mean and physically combative. President Benson wasn’t as bad, but he often didn’t know who he or anyone else was. Their children knew how bad the situation was, but they all acted like nothing was wrong and certainly didn’t tell others what was really going on. My sibs and I were shocked that the family and the Q14 acted like nothing was wrong. I’d already learned that church leaders can be very dishonest, but my younger sibs had a moment of awakening when they realized just how false our leaders can be when it suits their agenda, especially when the members of the Q15 are already old to begin with. Why can’t they become emeritus members at age 80 and allow them to enjoy what time they have left on earth?
I fear that the reason for this “dying in the harness” at a very advanced age is due to these men refusing to cede their power and prestige to others younger than them. If this is true then the church has a bigger problem on its hands. It’s called the sin of idolatry. The members idolize their leaders and treat them as more than mere mortals. The leaders idolize the power, prestige and wealth that they enjoy at the top. Both forms of idolatry are harming the church, but nobody wants to speak truth to the situation or are afraid to speak truth because it will land them in a church court for apostasy and “leading the members astray” for speaking the truth. This situation just compounds the dishonesty problem that the church already has as they’ve hidden so much from the members through the years, and for those who have eyes to see it can cause them to question the church as a whole, especially it’s integrity, and possibly cause them to decide that they need to leave.
To my knowledge, Catholicism acknowledges its deep past of popes with some of them good and some of them bad. Pope John Paul II notably apologized for the Crusades. Many popes in the past acknowledged and condemned the sale of indulgences. Popes admitting that past popes were wrong. The Catholics may say that there is papal infallibility, but no one really believes it, not even the popes themselves. Mormons claim that the leaders aren’t infallible and have made mistakes, but no one dares say what mistakes they’ve made and they treat them as if they are infallible.
Pope Benedict XVI stepped down in 2013 at the age of 85 citing health reasons. Why can’t Nelson step down? Heck, Dallin Oaks is next in line, but he’s 92. Why can’t he step down as well?
This problem with continue until they adopt a retirement age for apostles.
I haven’t read the comments, so I’m probably repeating what others have said, but this is like comparing sacrament trays with communion wafers. There are like 1.3 billion Catholics worldwide (how many of those are “active,” no idea), the Pope is the leader of technically a sovereign state, and what popes has said and done historically have had major geopolitical implications. The LDS prophet… Not so much. When the Pope dies and is replaced, it is a worldwide media spectacle with dramatic smoke things happening and wall to wall coverage. There is no LDS version of this. Most members are content with the idea that the current prophet is being “preserved” by the Lord. The older he gets – no matter his health status – the better that makes them feel. The church pretty much runs itself, anyway. As far as I’m concerned, if we’re not going to have mandatory retirement at 80, let RMN (and all the 90 and over GA’s) live out their final years in private. It’s ok if we don’t hear them speak or receive regular health status updates.
It seems to me that much of the problem of Mormon paeudo-infalliblity culture stems from the problems that occurred in the early Mormon church. Joseph Smith was originally considered quite fallible (and voted against by his own high council several times) but then Joseph was assassinated. Since this was in part due to previously close advisors spilling the beans on polygamy in an attempt to steer the church back on course (and end lying for the Lord), Brigham Young could use loyalty to Joseph Smith as not being a fallen prophet as a litmus test to consolidate control under his leadership of the Q12 . Then BY went even farther in terms of loyalty requirements when the Mormon colony in the Salt Lake came under siege by Buchanan. And how can you be unquestionably loyal to someone unless they are unquestionably right?
While larger organization have figured out the difference between loyalty to a group and loyalty to a leader, small ones rarely do. So then loyalty to head of the church morphed more and more into pseudo-infallibility and this of necessity morphs into secrecy about the details of a leader’s life, because it would be impossible to maintain the myth of paeudo-infalliblity if personal details are widely known. When your main selling point as a church is that you have a prophet who is the only one who gets to talk with God and people start to believe a prophet is chosen for their righteousness, the myth of complete righteousness becomes even more important. And secrecy became easier as the church grew larger with fewer percentage of members having any direct contact, and so the culture of pseudo-infallibility has kept growing stronger.
If Mormonism survives a thousand years, it will probably start to resemble the Roman Catholic Church flexibility on belief.
President Nelson is a much more visible part of the spiritual lives of LDS members than the pope is for Catholics. Despite the huge volume of written work and oral teaching that each popes produce, most of us outside of Rome and Italy don’t pay that much attention. I may get around to reading some of Francis’ encyclicals sooner or later, but I certainly don’t study his words in church on Sunday or bear testimony that I know he’s a pope. And most of us (particularly outside of Rome) don’t typically pay too much attention to his Wednesday audiences, although from time to time I do see a topic that interests me and may skim it.
This isn’t without precedence. Our church was grown during a time when most people couldn’t read, there was no printing press, and most people were unable to take any sort of pilgrimage to see the pope. I consider it pretty likely that your average serf would not even have known who the current pope was at any given time.
I’m not saying we don’t pay attention to the pope, we obviously do. And there’s always going to be exceptions to the above. But LDS spirituality and faith is built up around the prophet in such a way that he is quite literally not allowed to lose his faculties. I’d imagine it would shake some people up if the person they were testifying was a prophet of God couldn’t remember their own children’s names, for example.
I will add – I was a teenager when John Paul 2, and definitely wasn’t paying attention to anything leading up to it. I do remember when Benedict abdicated, speculations that he did not want the church to have to suffer his decline in the same way, and that the Vatican was rather tight lipped about the JP2’s health until close to the end.
JP2 was the first pope to die in the era of modern communication. I hope both Benedict’s and Francis’ approaches here are signifying some lessons learned.
The reality is that the church has built an administrative organization that can run pretty well for a pretty long time without much direction from the top. People know what their job is and how to do it. As I see it, there are two primary consequences of having a president incapacitated for an extended period. The first is that major decisions get put off. If any significant policy changes were under consideration, they wait for the next guy. The second is that there’s a bit of a power vacuum that allows senior apostles go unilaterally take actions with less accountability, like orchestrate 6 high profile excommunications in a single month, for example. Neither of these are desirable, but they don’t have a big impact on the church as a whole.
The assurances to members that the no-longer-visible president really is in charge is to me an admission that we have placed too much rhetorical importance on his being in charge. What they really mean is that the church is running just fine in spite of the president’s health.
I remember listening to a recording of Louis Midgely interviewing Hugh Nibley. At a certain point during the exchange Louis asked him how he felt about the leadership of the church. And Nibley answered, in so many words, that he felt great about it–because, as we know, Jesus Christ is at the head of the church. And then he finished by saying something like: and don’t worry–he knows what he’s doing.
My understanding is that papal infallibility is only factored in when the Pope speaks or writes ex cathedra (literally “from the chair”). The theologians I talked to made it quite clear that this rarely happened and it was abundantly clear to church leaders when the Pope wrote in such a manner. There is a phraseology used that signals such a declaration. In other words, personal teachings of various popes do not qualify.
On the other hand, there is no such clarity in the LDS tradition. The lines between teachings, doctrines and policies are very, very blurry.
Benson was the first prophet I remember as a child, and by “remember” I mean I recall primary teachers gushing about how wonderful it is to have him as a living prophet while displaying his portrait on the wall, singing choruses of “Follow the Prophet” (which was fairly new at the time), and building anticipation for the upcoming General Conference to “listen to a prophet speak”…and Benson was a no-show. Year after year, no appearance from the Prophet at all. Even as a child this confused me, like the prophet was some great and powerful Oz-like character who was too busy talking to Jesus to even bother showing his face before the general membership of the Church. And keep in mind I was too young to know who Steve Benson was.
The thing about the illusion of a healthy, robust prophet, is that even rank-and-file members (like well-meaning primary teachers) feel compelled to promote the myth and “protect the magic”.
Oaks is pretty frail too.
I work at BYU and recently I observed Oaks visiting for a meeting in a specific building. After the meeting, a couple of bodyguards helped him back into the car, and I saw that one of them put his seatbelt on for him. Reminded me of putting a toddler in a car seat.
the Vatican has to be open and truthful in the digital age. But the LDS Church does not, because they require members in good standing to take oaths of secrecy.
So when a prophet goes into hospice care, his LDS nurses cannot tip off the media or else their eternal salvation will be at stake.
Catholic hospital workers aren’t risking their eternal life when they tip off reporters. So the Vatican has evolved with the times in order to control their own narrative before the hospital does.