SALT LAKE CITY -- LDS Church President Gordon B. Hinckley told followers they have every right to celebrate their pioneer past, but he urged them to also befriend non-Mormons.
"We must not be clannish. We must never adopt a holier-than-thou attitude," he told a crowd of 20,000 at a Pioneer Day Commemoration Concert Sunday night at the church's Conference Center.
The leader of the 11 million-member Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints noted that both Salt Lake City and the state in general have become home to "many people of great diversity" in culture and religious expression since Mormon pioneers were led by Brigham Young into the Salt Lake Valley on July 24, 1847.
"I plead with our people to welcome them, to befriend them, to mingle with them, to associate with them in the promulgation of good causes," he said. "We are all sons and daughters of God."
The 91-year-old church leader noted that the 2002 Winter Olympics will draw "people in great numbers . . . from across the earth" to Utah.
Hinckley cast the coming of the Winter Games to Utah in a prophetic light, saying that Young once prophesied that "kings and emperors and the noble and wise of the earth will visit us here."
Regarding the pioneers, Hinckley said Mormons "must never permit ourselves to lose sight of the great and singular achievements of those who first came to this valley in 1847."
He said his grandfather had made the journey across the plains to Utah 151 years ago, leaving his wife buried along the trail.
"It was their faith that brought them here," he said. "It was their labor, consecrated labor (that caused) the desert to blossom as the rose. . . . On the anvil of adversity (the pioneers) were hammered and shaped and tempered."