Buffalo wrote:The repentance steps are only for the lay members and for the Catholics. The church leadership gets a pass on that.
The too-usual silly nonsense from Buffalo.
But it is true that repentance is for the person or persons who committed the offense. I can't repent for my neighbor's misdeeds, and he can't repent for mine.
Chap's point is more serious.
I think the expressions of "regret" from Elder Eyring and others have been just right. I don't think an "apology" or "repentance" on behalf of the Church itself is required, since I don't believe that the Church, as the Church, did anything substantially wrong.
Moreover, I don't think that an apology from the Church would be wise. Not for legal reasons (though some may apply), but because there are those (on this thread and elsewhere) who seek to pin the blame for the Mountain Meadows Massacre precisely on the Church. If the Church were to falsely assume even the appearance of any responsibility for the massacre, this would serve up a fast, slow-pitch softball to the Church's most rabid critics that they would be singing about for a century to come.
By contrast, if there's anybody who has ever suggested that the Catholic Church -- whether Rome or the hierarchy in Poland -- ordered that Polish massacre of Jews, I've never encountered the suggestion.
Chap wrote:The Catholic Church felt perfectly able to apologize corporately 'to God and to people' for wrongs done to the Jews by its members even though nobody has ever accused the then hierarchy of the Catholic Church of having organized massacres of Jews - probably because they simply didn't.
Although, over the centuries, sometimes Catholic leaders
did. At least on the more local level.
And, at other times, they showed themselves quite heroic in
defending Jews. And particularly so during the period in question. (I vigorously object, by the way, to those who call Pius XII "Hitler's pope" and claim that he was soft on Nazism. The historical record depicts him in quite the opposite way, and he has been unjustly maligned.)
I would rephrase Chap's comment, above, as follows:
Chap wrote:The Catholic Church felt perfectly able to apologize corporately 'to God and to people' for wrongs done to the Jews by its members precisely because nobody has ever accused the then hierarchy of the Catholic Church of having organized massacres of Jews - probably because they simply didn't.
On to the second part of Chap's comment:
Chap wrote:On the other hand, the CoJCoLDS has not apologized corporately for the wrongs done by its members at Mountain Meadows, even though this need not involve stating that the then leadership of the CoJCoLDS organized the massacre.
But, as I say, an institutional apology would, in the minds of many critics, constitute an admission of institutional guilt. And that would be a historical falsehood.
Furthermore, there is historically no question that certain distortions of Christian teaching over the centuries -- for which, sadly and by its own admission, the Catholic Church does bear some institutional responsibility -- have contributed to anti-Semitism in Europe. It is not inappropriate for the Catholic Church to apologize for that, and it has, very much to its credit, done so repeatedly. (Nowadays, and certainly since World War Two, the most virulent anti-Semitism is to be found among secular ideologues -- as the Nazis themselves pretty much were -- not among Christians.)
Again, by contrast, the best historical analysis of the factors leading to the Mountain Meadows Massacre shows little if any influence of Mormon doctrine on the events. There is, really, no need to invoke such influence as a factor -- Ockham's Razor is useful here as elsewhere -- because other factors explain what happened well enough without it.