Mormon Church’s Globe-Spanning Real-Estate Empire

From Guam to Cape Verde, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is using the financial cushion of its $100 billion investment portfolio to go on a temple-building spree

A whistleblower revealed a few years ago that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had an estimated $100 billion investment portfolio, and at the time, church officials called the holdings a rainy-day account.

They now say the money also has provided a financial foundation that gives the Mormon Church confidence to construct more than 100 temples, from Cape Verde to Guam, a series of stone-clad monuments exhibiting the church’s vast and expanding wealth.

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.