The Memo

The Pace Memo requires a lot of context. So please make sure you’re studied up on the Satanic Panic more broadly and the phenomenon in the state of Utah.

Lighthouse Ministries was an anti-Mormon publication in the 1990s in Utah. The once-relevant Lighthouse Ministries magazine would say anything to damage the Church. So when they received a tip about a leaked memorandum from inside the Church, their interest was piqued. Allegedly, a confidential memo sent from the Second Counsellor in the Presiding Bishopric, Glenn L. Pace, was somehow leaked to the Lighthouse Ministries, and its contents were shocking.

Known today as the Glenn L. Pace Memo, it was a report on a recent investigation by Bishop Pace into Satanic Ritual Abuse within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In the memo, Bishop Pace says he “met with sixty victims,” who reported that they had endured abuse, sometimes perpetrated by high-ranking Church officials. The abuse was harrowing and perverse, and implicated multitudes of Church members.

Lighthouse Ministries published the memo and it has stuck like a thorn in the neck of the Church for decades. No discussion about the abuse allegations of the LDS Church is complete without someone mentioning or citing the Glenn L. Pace Memo. When other accusations have come and gone, the Pace memo remains, stubborn, fixed, and immovable – until now.

The truth of the Glenn L. Pace Memo requires a little analysis. So let’s dive right in.

Context

Recall that 1989 was the height of the Satanic Panic nationwide. The McMartin Trial was still raging. No one yet knew that the original accuser was a schizophrenic, or that the defense withheld the full interviews of the children seeing levitating witches and Chuck Norris dressed in Satanic robes. The talk shows were still churning out salacious rumors, the news was trying to make sense of it, law enforcement was torn, the therapists were loud and the public was totally hysterical. In Utah, the Joyce Yost case was still unsolved, and the Hadfield case was at its highest, loudest and most divisive watermark.

According to a careful reading of the Pace Memo, this is precisely when Bishop Pace began his interviews. The Memo begins by mentioning that the Strengthening Church Members Committee had received a report from LDS Social Services in May 1989. “Pursuant to the Committee’s request,” Pace began interviewing one victim per week for 60 weeks, until he published his memo in July 1990. By this reckoning, Pace began his interviews immediately, as he already had a list of names.

But where did Pace find these alleged victims? A sloppy read makes it sound like he randomly interviewed latter-day Saints and discovered that they’d all been abused by Satanists. But that’s not what Pace says. According to Pace, he already had the names of self-selected and self-reported victims. These names were provided by LDS Social Services. In the 1990s, LDS Social Services provided “marital and family counseling” and even “general psychotherapy” and “counseling.” During the maelstrom of the Satanic Panic, patrons had been given counselling by therapists at LDS Social Services, and had reported recovered memory abuse. Pace indicates that he has not seen anyone who was not already “seeking help.” The 60 people Pace interviewed were not chosen at random, they were not a cross-section of membership at large, they were not representative of the Latter Day Saints. They were 60 people who used LDS Social Services for therapy and reported recovered memories of abuse.

For perspective, LDS Social Services was gigantic. Started in 1919, LDSSS opened two more branches in Ogden Utah and Los Angeles California. In 1962 they spread to Phoenix and Las Vegas. LDS Social Services provided: marital counseling, family counseling, addiction and drug dependency counseling, general psychotherapy, general counseling, services to women or girls experiencing unintended pregnancies, individual counseling, classes on strengthening marriage, classes on strengthening families, the now world-famous Addiction Recovery Program.

These services were not exclusive to members of the church either. Non-members patronized as well. By 1969 LDSSS had become so large, that it broke off from under the umbrella of the Relief Society to be a separate non-profit corporation. Just one of the services provided, adoption services, was so large it was one of the largest adoption agencies in the entire world. From 1 office in 1919, to 5 in 1962, LDSSS was managing 63 offices in 1990, when therapists and law enforcement were being flooded with strange reports of Satanic Ritual Abuse. It would be shocking, it would be highly suspicious, if somehow LDSSS did NOT receive reports of SRA along with every other therapist and counseling service in America at that time.

Every responsible organization in the country was nervous to navigate the rocky waters of SRA. The Church was no exception. By 1990, 1.3 of the 1.7 million population of Utah was Latter-day Saint. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints operated 5,386 congregations across the Beehive State, each one with a nursery for infants and a primary class for children under 12. Consider, that’s almost ten times the number of public schools in the State. No other institution was as closely involved with children than the Church of Jesus Christ.

The situation isn’t hard to imagine. The Church was receiving reports that everywhere else, and Church leaders were alarmed. Pace describes the scenario in his memo: “A bishop will go to his stake president who says he doesn't believe it is happening and that the member is just crazy. The stake president might go to an Area Presidency who will react in a similar way.” The local leaders are convinced the abuse isn’t happening, but they don’t know how to handle a very sincere and adamant claim from an alleged victim.

Consider also that all 60 of the interviewees which whom Pace met had psychological problems. “Most of them had been diagnosed as having multiple personality disorder or some other form of dissociative disorder.” That’s just those that were diagnosed.

The victims plead with Bishop Pace, describing a typical situation: “some parts” of the victims personalities “will begin to act out – perhaps promiscuously – and a good intentioned priesthood leader, will disfellowship or excommunicate an individual. All this does is reinforce the satanic indoctrination of the victims that they are no good.”

Any claim that the Pace memo represents discovery is false. Nothing is discovered in the Pace Memo. The word “discover” appears nowhere in the memo. Neither does the word “investigate” or “investigation.” These abuse reports were selected from the network of LDSSocial Services offices across the United States and given to Pace to follow up on, which he dutifully did.

Content

The Pace memo is seven typed pages long and spends 3 paragraphs actually discussing specifics, paragraphs 2, 3 and 19. That’s out of 63 paragraphs.

Pace reports that he “met with sixty victims,” all of them members of the Church, 45 claim to have participated in human sacrifice. The majority were abused by relatives.” The patients claim that the perpetrators were “temple recommend” holders or church leaders. Patriarchs, stake presidents, young women’s leaders and members of the Tabernacle Choir.

That’s where the specifics end. Seven pages. Pace provides no hard evidence for any claim. He writes: “I go out of my way to not let the victims give me the names of the perpetrators. I told them my responsibility is to help them with spiritual healing and that the names of perpetrators should be given to therapists and law enforcement officers.” (paragraph 17)

Bafflingly, no actual names are given, only their positions in the community. Making actual investigation and prosecution an impossibility. In all, over 800 nameless people were implicitly accused.

Why would you not ask for the names? If they are committing grievous sins, if they endangering children, shouldn’t that be the number one priority? To get the names of the alleged criminals?

But Pace doesn’t do that at all. Instead, he devotes his memo to a completely different aim.

How ironic is it, that in discussing something so serious, Pace brings no receipts? We are told in one breath that the most heinous evil is occurring, and in the next breath we’re told not to pursue the specifics?  Something so evil should be excised without detour and without interlude. Yet Pace takes 6 pages to recite from the book of Ether and to describe that the patients should be believed. The contrast is glaring. The more serious Pace makes the abuse sound, the most absurd the passivity of his memo appears.

Form

From the start, Pace admits that he is not interested in confirming the reports. He states that his purpose was “to obtain and intellectual and spiritual conviction as to the seriousness of this problem within the Church.”

Pace spends most of the memo explaining why recovered memory therapy should be accepted, and not dismissed as experimental: “Some have said that the witnesses of this type of treatment cannot be trusted because of the victim’s unstable condition and because practically all of them have some kind of dissociative disorder. in fact, the stories are so bizarre as to raise serious credibility questions.”

Then Pace begins to assuage the skepticism: “The irony is that one of the objectives of the occult is to create multiple personalities within the children in order to keep the "secrets." They live in society without society having any idea that something is wrong since the children and teenagers don't even realize there is another life occurring in darkness and in secret. However, when sixty witnesses testify to the same type of torture and murder, it becomes impossible for me, personally, not to believe them.”

First of all, why is Pace playing apologist to untried psychological theories? Was he supposed to investigate claims or abuse, or give the committee an introductory course of traumatic memory recovery therapy?  Secondly, Pace freely admits that the claims are bizarre, and strain credibility. The patients are themselves have serious mental illnesses.

Still, Pace chooses to believe the subjects for two reasons: 1, that their mental illnesses are the natural result Satanic Ritual Abuse, and 2 because their stories are the same.

However, Pace’s logic is backwards. The fact that all the witnesses suffer from serious mental disorders is as much evidence for their unreliability as it is for anything else.

Imagine the opposite: what if they witnesses were not at all mentally ill. Wouldn’t that lend more credibility to their claims? No, says Pace. The mental disorders are just what we would expect. But would we? Even if trauma can induce multiple personality disorder, which modern research does not support, must it do so 100% of the time? Were there no well-adjusted, not mentally ill witnesses to the abuse? Why not?

And similarly, to Pace’s second proof: if all the stories are exactly the same, couldn’t that be evidence that they are false? When interrogators get precisely the same story from two suspects, its evidence that the two aren’t reciting original memories, but that they collaborated to give the cops an alibi. If these patients are all telling the same story, then perhaps they are drawing from the same news reports that were saturating the airwaves at the very time.

The Pace Memo is not a report on an investigation. It is a piece of persuasive writing. 90% of the memo speaks in general language: "the victims..." "they don't know ..." "there are two reasons why adults..." "One of the most painful memories may be ..." Bishop Pace is not addressing any specific abuse claim, he’s explaining to the Committee why they should subscribe to recovered memory treatment as a viable psychological treatment method.

Pace’s memo sounds like a freshman college students report in an entry level psychology class. He is writing to convince the Committee, and himself, that the claims aren’t false. That this new kind of therapy isn’t hogwash.

Mouthpiece

In the context of the Satanic Panic, Pace’s Memo is perfectly predictable. There’s hardly a thing original in it. As usual, the patient report that prominent members of society were involved, instead of Priests, Cardinals and Pre-School workers, it’s Bishops, Stake Presidents and primary teachers.

None of the language use in Pace’s memo is new. His descriptions of being “baptized by blood” as a type of “doctrinal inversion” were very common motifs in the sensational books in the 80s. Michelle Remembers described an oath to the devil, or being “given to the devil,” just like in Pace’s memo. The “spiritual grooming” of children, the mock burial rituals, the buried, fragmented and layered memories, were very common phrases popularized in the media. Pace even gives away his borrowing ideas when he states that he assumes each of the 60 victims comes from a “coven of 13”, which is straight from Michelle Remembers by Pazder and Smith, The Satanic Underground by Lauren Stratford and The Satan Seller by Michael Warnke. Pace extrapolates: “I have met with 60 victims. Assuming each one comes from a coven of 13, we are talking about the involvement of 800 or so right here on the Wasatch Front.”

But this is disproved by Pace’s own memo. He said only 37 of his interviewees came from Utah. And he’s assuming no overlap at all. Bishop Pace is so concerned with pressing his case that he slips up on the math. He wants to inflate the number to create urgency because from the very start, Pace was a believer.

As Bishop Pace describes in his memo, the victims spoke while he just listened. Pace simply believed the stories and reported them up. When the memo came to the antiMormon Lighthouse Ministries, even they balked at Pace’s hyperbole: “many rational people will have a difficult time believing the statement that forty-five of the sixty victims "allege witnessing and/or participating in human sacrifice." Although we would not want to claim that this would be impossible, it does seem that it would be very difficult to cover up that many murders.” Lighthouse Ministries “doubted the authenticity of the memo,” but it was “simply too good an opportunity to attack and embarass the LDS Church to be skeptically dismissed.” (Introvigne) Lighthouse published it far and wide to peddle the narrative that seemingly peaceful Latter-day Saints were actually sacrificing babies. The headlines wrote themselves.

An analysis by A.I. shows that Michelle Remembers has the most influence on the language contained in the Pace Memo, followed closely by the Media coverage of the McMartin Trial started by schizophrenic Judy Johnson.  The Glenn L. Pace Memo is many things. But it is not original. At best it is a late-stage synthesis of already well-established tropes in public circulation. Pace recycles, Evangelical anti-cult theology, Recovered-memory therapeutic discourse, Media-amplified legal cases and popular SRA memoir templates. In other words, it reads as product of convergence and not origination. Anyone claiming the Pace memo shows anything new is simply wrong. All things considered, Pace and the State of Utah, were actually quite late to the game.

The anti-Mormons at Lighthouse Ministries and other news outlets were overjoyed to wave the Pace Memo around. In the periodical “Network: A Progressive Publication for Utah Women,” Gode David triumphantly wrote that “Soon after the memo [by Bishop Pace] was written and released to the Strengthening Church Members Committee of the church organization, the Utah Governor's Commission for Women and Families formed a subcommittee and task force to address issues of ritual (including Satanic) child abuse.” The Anti-Mormons at Lighthouse Ministries declared victory. Except that in reality, the subcommittee had been formed in February 1990, before Pace’s memorandum. Still, the claims persists to this day. The truth is, there’s no evidence the Pace Memo actioned any change from the Church that it wasn’t already making.

In conclusion: The Pace memo is

1. Not Investigative: The Pace memo wasn't an investigation at all, it's stated objective was to defend untested psychological theories. It is written as a persuasive essay, an apologetics piece.

2. Not Novel: The Pace memo merely summarizes existing claims made to LDS Social Services from their broad network of therapists and counsellors. The interviewees were nearly all suffering from diagnosed severe mental illnesses and all of them were actively seeking treatment.

3. Not Specific: Pace provided no dates, places nor names. A serious investigation would have been referred to law enforcement or church discipline. This report spent 59 out of 63 paragraphs speaking generally about tentative theories of psycho-therapy. The specifics about the projected number of perpetrators only demonstrates that Pace was not reading his own memo.

4. Not Actionable: Pace memo suggests no action. There's no evidence the Pace memo was accepted or believed by Church leaders.

5. Not Original: Pace's ideas and writing aren't even his own. Everything was repackaged from other sources. He was regurgitating what was ubiquitously rehearsed in the media around him.

Bishop Pace was undoubtedly a good man with good intentions. He had empathy and wanted to believe the people he was interviewing. In 1990, no one knew what to do with these claims. The science simply hadn’t caught up. So Bishop Pace cannot be blamed for being a product of his time. Tragically, Bishop Pace is only mostly known for this widely mis-understood memo, and not his lifetime of service in the Church.

For anti-Mormons, the Pace Memo is delicious. They bend and shape it into whatever they want. For them it is an in-depth criminal investigation, led by Detective Glenn Pace, uncovering Satanic Abuse in nearly every Ward, perpetrated in meetinghouses, in temples and by the most unlikely trusted leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  As we have seen: none of this is true.

For honest readers, the Pace Memo is nothing nefarious. The Church’s widespread humanitarian efforts put it in the middle of the Satanic Panic. Predictably the Church was flooded with SRA claims. Dutifully, the Church looked into them. Bishop Pace was asked to complete some due diligence. He returned and recited the catechism of his day. He fell onto one side of the current cultural divide.

Anti-Mormons today criticize the church for not doing enough to protect abuse victims. When Bishops are told about long-distant abuse, they usually respond with counsel to forgive. Anti-Mormon influencer, Julie Hanks, is quick to point out that Bishops aren’t therapists. But if Bishops aren’t therapists, then they certainly aren’t criminal investigators either. Bishop Pace’s career was spent in corporate finance, not psychology, let alone law enforcement or forensic detective work. Anti-Mormons reflexively dismiss Bishops as volunteer amateurs, unless they buy into the Satanic Panic, then they are Sherlock Holmes, speaking unvarnished truth.

Put in proper context, the Pace Memo is a nothing burger. But it struck at the perfect time when the fragile psyche of American parents were most vulnerable. It suck it’s roots deep into Utah and into the Church. Even today, readers view it in isolation and begin to get caught up in the hysteria again. There will always be claims from traumatized or imaginative people, but the Pace Memo can no longer be used as evidence. There’s no evidence whatsoever presented in the Pace Memo. It is only evidence that enemies of the LDS Church is distort anything to defame the good volunteers of the Church’s humanitarian efforts and ecclesiastical leadership.

Had the Pace Memo been released just two years later, it might have fizzled. Researchers were just starting to wake up to the absurdity of it all. The heroic therapists who were lucratively perpetuating the panic, would soon be exposed as frauds. False Memory Syndrome would become more clear. The fever would soon break. But in some circles, the Pace Memo refuses to die. Lets hope this helps clarify it a bit.