One point to consider is “the Mormons” are not necessarily a monolithic group any more than “the Christians” or “the Catholics” are. Sometimes people take the strangest things, even criminal things, into their own hands. They will be held accountable by the Lord, that we can be sure.

I can’t speak for my church. But I’m personally sorry about the massacre at Mountain Meadows.

Now, how about the state of Missouri apologizing for the Haun’s Mill massacre? At the moment, I’d even settle for a monument.

I appreciate your kind comments. That’s what I strive for - to be both fair, honest, and true to the best of my abilities. It’s good to receive that kind of feedback. From some of your recent blog entries that Brad links, I assure you that you are certainly fair, and often complimentary, toward the modern Catholic Church. I think my perspective comes from years of being an unfair critic of the Catholic Church, so I understand that a few bad facts can be used to pile-on. And even if I did call you once (actually twice) “willfully blind”, I find both you and Seth R. to be particularly fair.

As far as historical Catholicism goes, I truly bought the Protestant line that the Catholic Church tried to hide the Bible and keep people ignorant to what it contained. Never did I consider (probably because secular historians fail to mention it) that Bibles were particularly expensive before the printing press. They had to be hand-written. The Church also had to guard against heresy, which was very easy to perpetrate simply by mistranslating the sacred Word. Few historians in fact ground themselves in the realities of the time, and few allow for the fact that the Catholic Church may have had pure motives for maintaining one Latin bible for all. This is just one example where I misjudged the Catholic Church. I will do my best to remember the Catholic Church isn’t the only one that receives historical mistreatment. The LDS Church most certainly does as well.

JPII didn’t just apologize for the actions of the Church, but also for the actions of members of the Church, but these were for large-scale issues, like anti-semitic persecution. As bad as the MMM was, it was isolated and small-scale. And the murdering party involved was in fact kinder to the victims than Joshua was to the Jerico-ites. There is nothing at this time to apologize for, but I do encourage the LDS to investigate the matter further for the reasons I specified earlier.

I stand in awe of the perspective you as an outsider have of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. I hope I can learn to look at problematic events in Catholic history (which may have been perpetrated in spite of Catholicism instead of as a product or fruit of it) as charitably. I haven’t read Twain’s work, but some of humor at Mormon expense has tended to stick with me over time in an enjoyable, contemplative way. Twain was a very keen observer, so thanks for sharing that anecdote and seeing through some of his cynicism.

I have to agree with you about the notion of blood atonement as not really all that relevant to the MMM and I have been hammering that home on the Times and Seasons blog. It was an awful teaching and was the rhetorical Mormon equivalent of the fire and brimstone sermons about Hell, with the purpose of scaring people from doing evil.