A View of the Pacific

And in the process of time, the shores of the Pacific may yet be overlooked from the Temple of the Lord.

--Brigham Young

This week, 106 years after he wrote them, the words of the great patriarch of the Latter-day Saints came abundantly true. Some, 6,000 Mormons, led by President David O. McKay and ten of the Church's twelve Apostles, assembled atop a Los Angeles hill to lay the cornerstone of the largest (and eleventh) Mormon temple ever built.

The faithful looked with pride at the massive Mayan-style building, covered with cast panels of cement and Wasatch crushed rock, which overlooks the Pacific on the west and downtown Los Angeles on the east. When the temple is finished in the fall of 1955, the City of the Angels will have a new guardian--the Mormon's own Angel Moroni, in aluminum and gold leaf, sounding his trumpet from the templetop, 262 feet above the ground.

Inside, where no gentile (i.e., non-Mormon) may enter, the two main functions of every Mormon temple will be performed: baptism and marriage--of the long dead as well as the living. Retroactive ceremonies in behalf of the dead, Mormons believe, help to bring salvation to the billions who have died during history with no knowledge of the Mormon faith. Thus the Latter-day Saints are famous for their genealogical diligence; teams fan out from Salt Lake City headquarters to search genealogies all over the world that the dead may be known and saved with the aid of the living. Similarly the "sealing ceremony" vicariously marries up couples of modern Mormons' ancestors--eventually uniting all Mormons and (they hope) the world.

The $4,000,000 temple will be big enough to serve 100,000 living Mormons. At present there are some 70,000 Saints in the Southern California area, an increase of 10,000 in the past five years. Said President McKay: "More and more people are turning to us because this is the greatest way of life there is."

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