Mormon leader excommunicated

SALT LAKE CITY — A Mormon church leader was removed from his post and excommunicated Tuesday for the first time in nearly three decades.

James J. Hamula was released from a midlevel leadership council based on disciplinary action by the religion’s highest leaders, said Eric Hawkins, a spokesman for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Hawkins didn’t say why Hamula was ousted, but the Utahbased church said it was not for apostasy, which refers to teaching inaccurate doctrine or publicly defying guidance from church leaders.

Efforts to reach Hamula, 59, were not successful.

The last leader to be excommunicated was the late George Lee in 1989 after Lee, an American Indian, called Mormon leaders racist. The church said then that Lee was removed for “apostasy and other conduct unbecoming a member of the church.”

The last church leader removed before Lee was Richard Lyman, who was excommunicated in 1943 for adultery but baptized again 11 years later.

In 2008 Hamula became a member of the General Authority Seventy, a group of nearly 90 leaders who sit below the church president, his two counselors and two other levels of leaders.

Hamula was considered as a candidate to join the high-level Quorum of the Twelve Apostles when the church was filling three vacancies in 2015, said Matthew Bowman, a Mormon scholar and history professor at Henderson State University in Arkadelphia. In recent years, Hamula served in important roles as assistant executive director of church history and executive director of a department that reviews all documents published by the church.

“He had a promising future,” Bowman said.