Posted by:
FreeAtLast
(
)
Date: September 21, 2010 10:18PM
I was at my Mormon mother's and stepfather's home today (they were out) when the door bell rang. Through the etched glass, I recognized the distinctive Mormon 'uniform' for male missionaries. I opened the door, greeted them and introduced myself, and invited them in to the front hall. The senior comp. said they'd stopped by to get some food that my mother and stepfather had told them on Sunday would be available.
I went into the garage, found two bags of groceries, took them into the front hall, and handed them to the mishies. The senior comp. then said - a bit sheepishly - that my stepfather mentioned he'd bought milk for them. I went back into the garage, looked in the fridge, saw two jugs of milk, retrieved them, went back into the house, and gave them to the elders.
As I did so, I asked, "What do you guys get for cash each month to spend on groceries?" The senior elder replied, "$200 - but we have to pay for other stuff as well."
"For each of you, or per person?" was my next question. "For each," he responded.
Doing some math aloud, I said, "So, $200 bucks per month per missionary - that's a bit less than $50 per week. Hmmm. Seems a bit tight to me. Groceries CAN be costly."
As the older comp. started to agree with me, the junior elder said, "We ran out."
"Out of groceries?", I asked.
"Yes," they simultaneously replied.
"But, it's only September 21st," I pointed out. "What were you going to do for food for the next nine days if you hadn't gotten these groceries? Can't you get more money from the mission?"
"No," the senior companion replied. He went on to explain that out of the $200 per month, missionaries have to pay for not only food, but personal care items like shampoo, deodorant, shaving cream, etc., dry-cleaning, and some "car expenses."
Clearly, if missionaries run out of food before the end of the month, they're to go to local members and request - beg, effectively - for groceries.
The 'one, true' religious corporation of Jesus Christ, LD$ Inc., has spent at least $4 billion so far on its City Creek shopping-mall-and-condos project in Salt Lake City as well as several million this year on its new, 220-unit hotel in Hawaii and tens of millions of dollars on commercial real estate acquisitions during the past 12 months alone, according to news reports.
However, the super-wealthy LDS Church, which owns 17 pieces of priceless Rembrandt art plus billions of dollars of other assets, including water and mineral rights and commercial farms and ranches, won't spend a few extra million dollars annually to keep its 'army' of thousands of missionaries from going hungry.
No, along with scrubbing chapel toilets and performing other church building janitorial duties for free, keeping the mishies from experiencing an unwanted weight-loss each month has been 'downloaded' on to Latter-day Saints. Many of them have lost jobs in the Great Recession of the past three years and seen their home equity and retirement savings decrease significantly, thanks to the subprime credit catastrophe in the U.S. that began in early 2007.
As the elders left with the groceries, I wondered how many other local, financially hard-up members (my mother and stepfather are seniors) are going without even as LD$ Inc. spends millions and billions of dollars to increase its already massive wealth.