New temple and student group give life to Penn Mormons

While Penn’s Mormon community may have flown under the radar for the average student in past years, a new temple under construction and a recently formed student organization will give it an opportunity to make its presence known.

Following the ground-breaking ceremony last month, the Latter-day Saints temple located on 1739 Vine St. has been reaching out to members of the Mormon community at Penn, who are currently active in the LDS Church meetinghouse on 39th and Chestnut streets. The new temple — the first to be built in Pennsylvania — is slated for completion by 2014. It will serve more than 31,000 LDS Church members from congregations in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland.

“There are LDS faculty, students and workers at Penn, but it’s a minority group that is smaller relative to other denominations, so not many people are aware of it,” spokeswoman for the Philadelphia Congregation of the Church Melissa Yuen said. Establishing a partnership with the temple would “bring awareness of the LDS community to Penn.”

Many students had been meeting unofficially until the formation of the Latter-day Saints Student Association earlier this year, which currently has about 20 members. It hopes to build a presence on campus and eventually receive funding from the Student Activities Council.

“We meet on Tuesdays for scripture study, go to church on Sunday and try to have a sense of community and get to know each other,” College sophomore and LDSSA member Yaroslava Camacho said.

Once a month, the church organizes a trip to a Mormon temple — a more sacred space than a church that is reserved for selected members and designed for special ordinances, like marriages and baptisms. Because these temples are in Washington and New York, Mormon students at Penn are “really excited” about the new temple’s convenient location, Camacho said.

Although there is a relatively small Mormon population at Penn and peer schools, ­some choose these institutions over Brigham Young University, a predominantly Mormon school in Utah that offers reduced tuition to Mormon students. “I really wanted to be surrounded by people of different religions and cultures,” Camacho said. “I felt that it was a better atmosphere … with more diversity.”

“It’s exciting that the church is in the news — we’re glad that people are starting to understand more of what we believe,” she added.

The Mormon religion has recently become a hot-button issue in politics, as Mormon Republican presidential candidates Mitt Romney and 1987 College graduate Jon Huntsman are both being challenged with regard to their faith.

“In an age when every facet of the lives of public servants is fair game, rightly or wrongly, their faith commitments and spirituality are bound to come up,” University Chaplain Chaz Howard said. According to Yuen and Camacho, the temple and the LDSSA are both politically neutral and are not endorsing any particular political candidate.

The Philadelphia temple — one of 26 announced temples in construction among 135 operating temples worldwide — will “complement other architecture in the area, such as Greek revival buildings and the Catholic cathedral nearby, but also stand as a unique structure,” Yuen said.

“It’s important to build a friendship between the LDS community and other religious denominations,” Yuen added. “We want to work toward a common goal of trying to become better people, and [building] a sense of unity and inclusion.”

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