And Now You Know The Rest Of The Story.

Brunch on the Queen Mary — The staff stand at the ready for the arrival of the First Presidency and the Twelve after the morning session of Sunday conference.
(Photo borrowed by critic of the Church from unidentified source. I borrowed it from him.)

The other day, I posted an entry here about the lavish banquets supposedly enjoyed by the leaders of the Church between the sessions of General Conference. (See “Glutting themselves upon the labors of their dupes?”) While, allegedly, the Brethren are dining on fresh imported caviar and the brains of soon-to-be-extinct species of fish and monkeys, and being cooled by slaves with peacock-feather fans, ordinary members of the Church are outside on the corners of Temple Square with begging bowls, clad in rags — paying, praying, and obeying.

The photograph above, suggests the critic of the Church who posted it, depicts the palatial dining hall that awaits the First Presidency and the Twelve when they take breaks from luxuriating in their plush velvet chairs at the Conference Center.

You might be pardoned for assuming that it shows a room in the Church Administration Building or the Church Office Building or the Joseph Smith Memorial Building, directly east of Temple Square, or even the top floor of the Salt Lake City Utah Temple.

Here’s a shocker, though:

It actually shows the first-class dining area of the RMS Queen Mary, the now-retired Cunard Line ocean liner that is docked in Long Beach, California.

But how, you may ask, do the leaders of the Church have the time to travel to Long Beach, dine extravagantly there, and return to the Conference Center during the two-hour breaks that are allotted to them? And they neither rush out nor reappear breathlessly just microseconds before the television broadcast begins. So how do they do it?

Granite Mountain Palanquins — When not in use, the apostolic litters are kept in a quite ordinary warehouse located, along with other secret General Authority treasures, in a granite bunker up a mountain canyon from the Salt Lake Valley.
(Wikimedia Commons public domain photo)

No, they don’t fly in private warp-speed rocket craft — though that is a perfectly understandable first guess. In reality, the Queen Mary leaves its berth in Long Beach twice annually, around April and October of each year, and sails to Salt Lake City. While it is in Utah, it is moored directly east of the Beehive House and the Lion House, so as to keep it out of sight of the gullible masses. Immediately upon completion of a given conference session, members of the Twelve and the First Presidency are quickly carried over to the Queen Mary in individual litters or palanquins, each borne by six or more carefully selected mute slaves. Then, when the lavish feast is finished, they are borne swiftly back to the Conference Center where they assume their plush velvet chairs yet again.

Such is the life, according to at least a few critics of the Church, of its leaders.

And now you know the rest of the story.