Inside the Mormon Church’s Globe-Spanning Real-Estate Empire

In Pocatello, Idaho, a city of 56,000 in the rural southeastern corner of the state, a recently constructed temple stands at 71,125 square feet. Its polished limestone flooring was quarried in Bethlehem, the biblical birthplace of Jesus, and wood for its doors was imported from the Congo River region.

A statue of the angel Moroni, an important figure in the religion, tops a central spire, 195 feet off the ground. The temple cost $69 million to construct, according to estimates by the church’s contractors on city building permits.

“We have a vision of the church that is—can I use the word grandiose?” said Gérald Caussé, the church’s presiding bishop, in an interview. “Because we believe the gospel has to be taken to all the world. And so we see the size of the church multiple times what it is now, in the future.”

Caussé and other church officials declined to discuss details of the church’s finances, such as the costs of building temples or the size of the church’s assets.

Some church members express discomfort with the church’s accumulated wealth—and how it is deployed—and the limited public disclosures about its finances. These tensions were heightened this year after securities regulators fined the church for making false statements in financial disclosures.

Paul Huntsman, a scion of one of Utah’s richest and most prominent families, said the church needs to start being transparent about its holdings. “They’re in the business of morality. They have to take the moral high ground on this,” said Huntsman, a church member and president of Huntsman Family Investments, the family’s investment arm.

Caussé said keeping the church’s financial information confidential is a matter of principle. “It’s important for us that we maintain our privacy,” he said. “That’s a value that’s important for religion.”

Building boom

Temples are the most sacred places of worship in the church. Marriages, under the church’s teachings, must be blessed in the temples for them to last for eternity. Until this year when Puerto Rico got its first temple, couples needed to leave the island for their marriages to be so blessed.

The church has announced 133 new temples since Russell Nelson, a 98-year-old retired surgeon, became its president five years ago. Completing them, plus others under construction or in the design stage, would give the church 315 worldwide, up from 174 operating now. 

The church’s leaders say they expect hundreds more after those. Nine of the 15 new locations announced this year are outside the U.S. It is already building its first temples in Ivory Coast, Cambodia and Papua New Guinea. 

Decades of economic gains by the church and its 17 million members have made the push possible, largely through a flood of cash from tithing, the practice by which members donate 10% of their income each year to the church.

Caussé, a 60-year-old former food-industry executive born in Bordeaux, France, discussed the church’s plans for its fortune in an interview at the church’s Salt Lake City headquarters with the other two members of the church’s presiding bishopric, an ecclesiastical arm that oversees the church’s financial affairs.

“President Nelson feels that he can announce all these temples because he knows that there are reserves to maintain these temples for a long time, whatever happens in the world,” Caussé said.

The $100 billion investment portfolio first came to light in 2019, after a former fund manager at the church’s investment arm, Ensign Peak Advisors, filed a whistleblower complaint with the Internal Revenue Service.

The former employee, David Nielsen, said Ensign Peak shouldn’t be treated as a tax-exempt charity because it didn’t use any of its money for religious, charitable or educational activities. 

In February, the church and Ensign Peak agreed to fines of $1 million and $4 million, respectively, to settle Securities and Exchange Commission claims that they obscured the church’s investment holdings. The SEC alleged the church used more than a dozen hard-to-trace shell companies to file false disclosure reports that hid the size of its investments for almost 20 years.

Caussé declined to discuss details of the SEC settlement. “We recognize mistakes, and we regret mistakes,” he said. The church says cash from Ensign Peak helps fund its religious, charitable and educational activities. “There is no other purpose. Nobody is getting rich,” Caussé said. “Everything goes to these.”

As the SEC requires, Ensign Peak now discloses its U.S. stockholdings—a subset of the total—which it valued at $46.2 billion as of March 31. The figure doesn’t include other types of investments, such as bonds, private equity or real estate. 

The church also has misstated its assets on federal tax returns. On its 2007 return, Ensign Peak put down “1,000,000” for its total assets. The real number was about $38 billion, an Ensign Peak document shows. In later years, Ensign Peak wrote “over 1,000,000” on its returns. The church followed the same practices on its own IRS returns, where it reports business income unrelated to its tax-exempt mission.

Church officials said they believe that, as a religious organization, the church doesn’t have to disclose its assets. Todd Budge, another member of the presiding bishopric, said anyone familiar with the church would know its assets exceeded $1 million. “It wasn’t an accurate answer. It wasn’t meant to be an accurate answer,” said Budge, a 63-year-old former banking and private-equity executive. “It was simply meant to communicate that we do not feel that we’re obligated to fill in that box.”

The IRS hasn’t acted on the original whistleblower complaint and wouldn’t comment on the church. 

After the investment portfolio came to light in 2019, church leaders said it was a fund to be used in difficult economic times. Some current and former members of the church have said that when a rainy day hit, in the form of the Covid pandemic, the church could have done more to aid its far-flung members.

A colorful brochure released in 2021 by Latter-day Saint Charities, the church’s humanitarian arm, said it had spent $2.5 billion over the previous 35 years, which included about $200 million in 2020, when the pandemic began—a tiny fraction of its wealth. The church subsequently revamped its methodology for reporting charitable spending and said it spent $1 billion last year and $906 million in 2021.

David Donato, a film editor in São Paulo, Brazil, who left the church about 10 years ago, said that in his family’s hometown of Araraquara, the church lent one of its chapels to be used for hospital beds during the pandemic. The church held a photo-op and issued a press release when the city returned the keys to the chapel. 

“I wouldn’t say they are not doing anything,” he said. “If you compare it to the billions of dollars they’re sitting on, it’s negligible. I commend them for what they did, at least.”

Church officials said the church had more than 1,000 relief projects in about 130 countries during the pandemic. Caussé said the church spent millions of dollars on pandemic aid in Brazil, where it has almost 1.5 million members, its third-largest population after the U.S. and Mexico. The decision about lending the chapel for hospital beds would have been made by the local congregation, officials said.

Caussé said the church’s humanitarian spending has increased 10-fold in the past 10 years and accelerated during the pandemic. “It’s not just about adding a zero at the end of a check,” he said. “That’s not how it works. It takes time to put the structure in every country, every area of the world, and this is what we have been doing.”

Jana Riess, a 53-year-old church member and columnist for Religion News Service, said she stopped tithing to the church and instead donates the money to charities that feed hungry children. “Our church is supposed to be following Jesus, and there is no example of Jesus hoarding wealth while children are starving in the world,” she said. 

Giant temples

Church officials say the investment portfolio supports the church’s growth, and that building new temples is a crucial part of that mission.

Temples differ from the thousands of meetinghouses or chapels used for regular worship services. Temples are the only place where sacred ceremonies known as sealings, which include weddings, can be performed to unite families for eternity, one of the divinely appointed responsibilities of the church. Tithing is required of members to gain admission to the church’s temples.

Temples, which rely on the description of Solomon’s Temple in the Bible, can be opulent affairs and are often hard-to-miss structures in cities. The Pocatello, Idaho, temple, which opened in 2021, towers over the neighborhood in a region that has become a stronghold for the church.

When the church made a temple-building push in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the structures were designed to be cost-effective, minimalist and focused on rituals rather than the materials, said Benjamin Park, a professor at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, who has written two books on Mormon history. “Now you’re getting another impulse, actually materials do matter, showing devotion,” he said.

Last year, the church opened five new temples—two in Brazil, including one in Rio de Janeiro, and one each in Guam, Cape Verde and Ecuador. The temples in Brazil and Ecuador range from 28,675 to 36,780 square feet, while the others are much smaller.

The temple in Belém, along the Amazon River, brought the number in Brazil to nine and will serve tens of thousands of members in northeastern Brazil who previously had to travel to the temple in Fortaleza, a two-hour flight away. The “blue, green, yellow and pink color palette [of the stained glass] is a nod to the rainforest that covers much of the region,” the church said shortly before the temple opened in November.

The church dedicated a temple the same day in Quito, Ecuador, its second in the country, which is home to about 260,000 members. The exterior is clad in white Turkish limestone, a church press release said. In addition to the 36,780-square-foot temple, the four-building complex includes a 23,463-square-foot ancillary building.

“I think the church is recognizing that they’re facing a financial cliff in coming generations,” Park said, noting most of the church’s membership growth is coming from developing countries that don’t generate as much tithing revenue. Having a $100 billion investment portfolio helps ensure it can keep expanding globally. “I think this financial nest egg is a way to kind of calm that anxiety,” Park said.

Write to Jonathan Weil at [email protected]