Two weeks after representatives of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) received an unprecedented invitation to an ecumenical gathering with Pope Benedict, the Vatican has instructed all bishops to deny Mormons access to Catholic baptismal records, as they might be seeking them to perform posthumous rites, writes Rocco Palmo.

First reported by Catholic News Service, the letter from the Congregation for the Clergy was dated prior to the Pope's US visit last month, but only emerged after his return to Rome. In it, the Congregation for the Clergy insisted that parish registers be withheld from the Mormon Genealogical Society of Utah. Potentially useful for providing names for "proxy" baptisms of the dead - which, the LDS believes, earn Mormons enhanced standing in the hereafter - the 14 million-member Church's ancestral research amounts to one of  the world's most comprehensive collections of family histories.

While Catholics and Mormons have traditionally enjoyed good relations in the LDS home base of Utah, the US bishops' leading ecumenist, Fr James Massa, said that the letter was written "to make very clear" that posthumous baptisms are "unacceptable from the standpoint of Catholic truth". Although the proxy baptisms are often assumed to be of non-Mormon relatives of LDS members, reports on the Church's International Genealogical Index have discovered that its records include figures such as Mao Zedong, Stalin and Pope John Paul II.