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WELFARE AND FINANCES. Just last month the Mormons released for the first time data on their huge welfare expenditures to their needy members: more than $ 17.7 million in 1971. About $8,000,000 was raised by their monthly fast days, after which they turn over the price of missed meals to their poor. Despising doles, the Mormons insist that welfare recipients, even in their 70s and 80s, earn their checks by working on farms, in canneries, or in other welfare industries. It was the recent threat by Salt Lake County to put these properties on the local tax rolls that prompted the Mormons to divulge the extent of their welfare activities—a revelation that quickly persuaded the county fathers to leave the properties taxfree.
It was Harold Lee who organized and ran the church's vast and efficient welfare system from 1937 to 1959. He now wants to expand the scope of Mormon welfare to include more rehabilitation programs for alcoholics, drug abusers and ex-convicts. The church remains tightly mum about most expenditures, but one sign of prosperity is a new 30-story, $30 million world headquarters recently erected behind the temple. By Mormon policy, all buildings are paid for as they are built.
BLACKS. To many outsiders the most urgent problem for Mormons is the fact that blacks of African ancestry are still denied entrance into the broad Mormon "priesthood," the full-fledged membership to which all other adult Mormon males are entitled.* In Utah, where less than 1% of the population is black, the issue does not seem so pressing. There are, however, 240 black Mormons in the area of Salt Lake City, many of whom are chafing at their second-class status. Some were converted before they learned that they could not become priests. Charges Darius Gray, 26: "I didn't hear about it until the night before I was baptized." By then, Gray was too convinced of Mormonism's truthfulness to back out, even though the restriction still galls him. Another young Mormon black, Eugene Orr, is distressed that unlike other Mormon fathers, he will be unable to baptize his own son when the youngster is eight and ready for the ritual. "I am not about to hand my child over to a white man to bless him," insists Orr, but he sticks by Mormonism all the same. "You wonder why we continue in the church?" he asks. "It's because I know that this is the true church. And truth is truth; you can't get around that."
In God's eternal plan, American blacks have been assured, they will some day be given the right to become Mormon priests. Although there is no sign that the day is imminent, Harold Lee, the "revelator," could theoretically receive the word from God any time. Meanwhile, he advises blacks to become Mormons anyway. Even if they cannot attain the highest privileges, he says, they will "get more by baptism into the true church than they would otherwise."