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<\/a>If all goes according to plan and if my understanding is not mistaken, I will be speaking at Buckland House on the grounds of the Sydney Australia Temple<\/a> this Thursday night, 22 February 2024. \u00a0I don\u2019t know the time yet, but it will be in the evening. \u00a0I\u2019m guessing that it will begin at about 7:00 PM or 7:30 PM, but I\u2019ll try to get the time nailed down as soon as I possibly can.<\/p>\n It has been a while, I think, since I\u2019ve been out to the Sydney Australia Temple grounds. \u00a0I don\u2019t believe that I visited the Temple during my immediately previous visit to Sydney, and my last visit to Australia before that<\/em> took me solely to Melbourne. \u00a0But what I think was my most recent visit to the Temple grounds and, if I\u2019m not mistaken, to Buckland House, is a significant memory of mine and is connected with other significant experiences \u2014 in Rome, no less. \u00a0Here\u2019s some of the back story:<\/p>\n For a time, during the period when I was on loan from my BYU home department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages to what would come to be known as the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, one of my principal areas of responsibility (alongside the Middle Eastern Texts Initiative, which was my baby) was oversight of what we called the Center for the Preservation of Ancient Religious Texts, or CPART.\u00a0 In turn, among the major focuses there in CPART was our work on a searchable database of the Dead Sea Scrolls and our effort to digitize damaged records recovered from such places as the ruins of ancient Herculaneum<\/a> and the long-forgotten Maya murals at Bonampak<\/a>, in the Mexican state of Chiapas.\u00a0 (By the way, a good though now rarely seen 2003 documentary film \u2014\u00a0Out of the Ashes: Recovering the Lost Library of Herculaneum<\/em><\/a> \u2014\u00a0<\/span>was made of our work in Italy.\u00a0 For a solid basic overview of the Dead Sea Scrolls project to that point, see this 1996 article:\u00a0 \u201cFrom the Caves of Qumran to CD-ROM.\u201d<\/a>)<\/p>\n Hearing of these efforts, we were contacted one day by Mar Bawai Soro<\/a>, who was at the time a bishop in the Assyrian Church of the East.\u00a0 (In the wake of considerable and painful ecclesiastical turmoil related to his ecumenical efforts \u2014 which was already beginning when we began to work with him \u2014 Mar Bawai later became an Eparch of the Chaldean Catholic Church.)\u00a0 He wanted to know whether our technology could be used to digitize and preserve ancient Syriac manuscripts that were held by the Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana (the Vatican Apostolic Library), but that were centrally important to his very old Middle Eastern religious tradition.\u00a0 The Vatican had acquired the manuscripts over previous centuries, and they were now essentially inaccessible to members of his small, impoverished, persecuted, and largely Iraqi church.\u00a0 Could we preserve them, he wondered, and make them searchable?<\/p>\n We were confident that the technology would work.\u00a0 The politics, however, were a different matter.\u00a0 Whereas we had been effectively invited<\/em> to help with Herculaneum and the Dead Sea Scrolls, we couldn\u2019t imagine that the Vatican would be especially thrilled at the thought of allowing Latter-day Saints access to work in its library.\u00a0 Bishop Soro, however, was living much of each year in Rome at that time, pursuing a doctorate there from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas \u2014 the famous \u201cAngelicum,\u201d as it is often called \u2014 and he said that it wouldn\u2019t hurt to ask.\u00a0 We told him to feel free to ask.\u00a0 We didn\u2019t expect much to come of it.<\/p>\n Soon thereafter, Mar Bawai told us the story of what happened next.\u00a0 He went to the Vatican City office of Edward Cardinal Cassidy<\/a>, who was serving at that time as president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity under Pope John Paul II. \u00a0(Some have told me that he was the third-ranking official in the Vatican, after the Pope himself and the Vatican Secretary of State.) \u00a0In that capacity, of course, he was responsible for building relationships with non-Catholic Christians and Christian denominations.\u00a0 Bishop Soro asked him whether he would be open to the idea of doing a great favor to the Assyrian Church of the East by allowing the digitizing of their records that were held in the Vatican.\u00a0 Cardinal Cassidy pointed out that the Assyrian Church of the East lacked the technical and financial resources to carry out such a project, and asked whether Bishop Soro had a partner in this idea and, if so, who it might be.<\/p>\n Only considerably later did we come to understand that this was no merely idle question.\u00a0 There had been a major scandal in 1997 in which the Vatican Apostolic Library had been ripped off by a consortium that had undertaken to digitize its holdings.\u00a0 The Irish-Canadian Father Leonard Boyle<\/a> had been ousted as Prefect of the Library that year because of his mistaken judgment in the matter \u2014 he didn\u2019t do anything wrong; he was simply a na\u00efve medievalist scholar who was cheated by a handful of greedy American scoundrels \u2014 and he died just two years after, in 1999.\u00a0 (Some years further on, I happened to be visiting the Basilica di San Clemente, where by chance I saw his tomb and thought of his sad story.)<\/p>\n Cardinal Cassidy wanted to be sure that the Vatican wasn\u2019t being set up for a second round of disaster.<\/p>\n Mar Bawai\u2019s concerns were quite different and, he eventually told us, he was pretty much looking at his feet when he whispered that it was \u201cthe Mormons\u201d who were in line to help him and his community.\u00a0 He had, he told us, already prepared something of a little speech about how we weren\u2019t actually all that bad, really.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Mormons!\u201d Cardinal Cassidy exclaimed.\u00a0 \u201cOh, I like<\/em> Mormons!\u201d\u00a0 And he not only placed no obstacles in the way of the project, he facilitated it.<\/p>\n We were quite shocked when we heard that story.\u00a0 We wondered why a very high-ranking Vatican cardinal would especially\u00a0like<\/em> Latter-day Saints.\u00a0 It turns out that there was (as might have been expected), a story behind that exclamation.<\/p>\n Pope John Paul II visited Australia in 1986.\u00a0 In preparation for that visit, Cardinal Cassidy, a native of Sydney, was sent to meet with government and other officials to make arrangements.\u00a0 Among other things, a reception was organized for him in Sydney so that he could meet non-Catholic religious leaders in the area.\u00a0 Among those invited to the reception was Elder V. Dallas Merrell<\/a>, a member of the Seventy who was then also serving in the Australia area presidency.\u00a0 Holder of a doctorate in public administration, Elder Merrill had been a political consultant and even a senatorial candidate in Maryland, and he was very outgoing.\u00a0 He made a beeline toward Cardinal Cassidy, and the two hit it off like old friends.\u00a0 By the time Bishop Soro met with Cardinal Cassidy, Elder Merrill had visited with him in Vatican City \u2014 you can see a photograph of Elder and Sister Merrell with Cardinal Cassidy here<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 and, almost unbelievably, the cardinal, wearing merely an ordinary priest\u2019s garb for the trip, had been (so I\u2019m told) a quiet and unheralded guest of the First Presidency and the Twelve in Salt Lake City.<\/p>\n Anyway, the project to digitize Syriac records in the Vatican went forward, and eventually it brought me and Elder Merrell and Daniel J. Oswald (the then director of FARMS, later the Maxwell Institute) and Gary Merrill of southern California (a friend of Elder Merrell\u2019s and a valued supporter of our efforts, who deserves his own entry) on an official visit to Rome and Vatican City to sign a contract.\u00a0 While there, we met with Monsignor Raffaele Farina, then the Prefect of the Vatican Library (and now himself a cardinal) and with Jorge Mar\u00eda Cardinal Mej\u00eda, the overall head of the Vatican Library and Archives.\u00a0 To my astonishment, Cardinal Mej\u00eea kindly and spontaneously showed us some of the transcripts from the trial of Galileo as well as the famous Codex Vaticanus<\/a>.\u00a0 Considerably later, on a subsequent visit, we were able to take some of our major donors on a tour of the Library, which most tourists will never see.\u00a0 One amusing aspect of our meeting with Monsignor Farina:\u00a0 He was about to sign the contract or memorandum of agreement with us when, suddenly, he stopped.\u00a0 He said he could not go forward with the signing if the\u00a0Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana were not listed, with Brigham Young University, as co-sponsor of the project.\u00a0 I laughed and indicated that I was going to ask<\/em> for that.\u00a0 So we proceeded<\/a>.<\/p>\n While there, of course, we had to visit with Elder Merrell\u2019s friend, Cardinal Cassidy.\u00a0 So we had a couple of very warm visits with him in his office.\u00a0 A few things from those visits stick out in my mind still today:<\/p>\n One day, we gave him a copy of the Proclamation on the Family<\/em>, which had been issued relatively recently by the First Presidency and the Council of the Twelve Apostles.\u00a0 The next day, when we visited with him, he indicated that he himself could have easily signed such a document.\u00a0 (Perhaps he had skimmed too quickly over the passage about the pre-mortal existence of human spirits.)<\/p>\n At one point, we were discussing the idea of \u201cgeneral revelation,\u201d as opposed to personal<\/em> revelation. \u00a0I won\u2019t forget his response.\u00a0 \u201cI can assure you,\u201d he said, \u201cthat no pope has ever claimed a revelation.\u201d\u00a0 And, as he said that, he spread both arms to his sides with his hands extended, palms down, to indicate the absoluteness of what he was saying.\u00a0 I remember thinking, \u201cHere\u2019s some common ground that we can agree on!\u201d<\/p>\n I recall, too, his volunteering that Martin Luther had solid reasons for complaining about corrupt practices in the Catholic Church of that period.\u00a0 He lamented the break caused by the Reformation but, he said, he could easily understand it.<\/p>\n At the time, he was preparing to retire from the Vatican and return to Australia.\u00a0 So he wanted us to meet the man who would succeed him as\u00a0as president of the\u00a0Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, Walter Kasper<\/a>, the Bishop of Rottenburg-Stuttgart, who had also just been named a cardinal.\u00a0 I was, I confess, very disappointed at the thought of not being able to continue to work with this genial Australian, and feared that things might be very different with a Teutonic, German, ecclesiastical official.\u00a0 But Cardinal Kasper \u2014 technically, he hadn\u2019t quite yet been \u201ccreated\u201d cardinal \u2014 was extremely kind and accessible.\u00a0 He was very excited at the thought of future contacts between Latter-day Saint \u201ctheologians\u201d and Roman Catholic theologians, and proposed a series of meetings.\u00a0 He had checked around, prior to meeting with us, and had discovered that there was, so far as he could tell, no senior leader in Vatican City who had ever had a serious conversation with a Latter-day Saint.\u00a0 Alas, though, and for reasons (on our side) that I still regard as insufficient, nothing ever came of that.<\/p>\n Cardinal Cassidy also invited us to attend a meeting at the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls (San Paolo fuori le Mura) between Pope John Paul II and a large group of bishops from the \u201cseparated\u201d Eastern churches.\u00a0 I once wrote about this remarkable experience for the Deseret News<\/em>:<\/p>\n \u201cWhen the Pope left the Vatican for a meeting of healing: When Pope John Paul II hosted a number of bishops from the ancient non-Catholic churches of the East, the location of the Papal Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls was significant\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n It was the closest I\u2019ve ever come to a pope \u2014 perhaps about twenty or twenty-five feet or so \u2014 and, so far as I\u2019m aware, the closest I\u2019ve ever come to a (living) Catholic Saint:\u00a0 He was canonized on 11 September 2014 and is now officially known as Pope Saint John Paul II, to which some add \u2014 and I would be inclined to agree \u2014 \u201cthe Great.\u201d<\/p>\n One day, when the four of us were standing in St. Peter\u2019s Square \u2014 which, like Cairo\u2019s Tahrir Square, isn\u2019t actually square \u2014 after a meeting with Cardinal Cassidy, the question was raised about how we, as Latter-day Saints whose belief in the Restoration presupposes belief in a Great Apostasy, ought to regard obviously good men like Cardinals Cassidy, Mej\u00eea, and Kasper, as well as Pope John\u00a0 Paul II himself (one of my heroes) and James Francis Cardinal Stafford<\/a> (another of Elder Merrell\u2019s friends, whereby hangs yet another interesting tale for some coming time).\u00a0 The thought came to me very forcefully on that occasion that the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church were indeed the successors of the first leaders of the fledgling first-century community of Christians in Rome, and that, as such, they deserved our deepest respect.\u00a0 Yes, some of the doctrines and more than a few of the practices of early Christianity had disappeared or been altered.\u00a0 Yes, from our perspective, they lacked genuine priesthood ordination and authority.\u00a0 And, sadly yes, some historical popes and cardinals had been, to put it mildly, wickedly immoral.\u00a0 (I doubt that any informed contemporary Catholic would deny that.\u00a0 Consider, for example, Pope Alexander VI.<\/a>)\u00a0 But the vast majority of Catholic clergy and \u201creligious\u201d (nuns, for example), historically and certainly today, have been good people, trying to do the right thing, trying to serve Christ and the people.\u00a0 Even during the Apostasy, the Church preserved the Bible and kept basic Christian doctrines alive and taught fundamental Christian virtues.\u00a0 Meeting people like Cardinal Mej\u00eda and Cardinal Kasper and then-Monsignor Farina and Cardinal Cassidy \u2014 and my beloved teacher in Cairo, Father Georges Anawati (on whom see \u201cFather Anawati, Part One,\u201d<\/a> and \u201cFather Anawati, Part Two,\u201d<\/a> and \u201cFather Anawati, Part Three\u201d<\/a>) \u2014 has only served to increase my respect for committed Roman Catholics.<\/p>\n I did not see Cardinal Cassidy again for several years after my experiences with him in Rome, though I thought of him fairly often.\u00a0\u00a0In 2006, however, my wife and I were privileged to be there and involved when the then-president of the Australia Area Presidency for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints<\/a>, the late Elder Paul K. Sybrowsky of the Seventy, presented the cardinal with the \u201cJohn Simpson Standing for Something Award\u201d for his efforts to foster interfaith and intercultural understanding. \u00a0The presentation occurred during a program on the grounds of the Sydney Australia Temple. \u00a0It was very good to see him again at that time, which I correctly presumed would be my last opportunity.<\/p>\n Cardinal Cassidy died in Newcastle, New South Wales \u2014 north of Sydney, up the coast \u2014 on 10 April 2021, at the age of 96. \u00a0Re<\/span>qui<\/span>es<\/span>cat in pa<\/span><\/em>ce<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/a><\/a>