
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, March 4, 1995                   TAG: 9503060051
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A10   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: SALT LAKE CITY                                 LENGTH: Short

LEADER OF MORMONS DIES OF CANCER AT 87

Howard W. Hunter, already frail when he became president of the Mormon Church last spring, died Friday at age 87 after just nine months as ``prophet, seer and revelator'' of the 9 million-member faith.

The former corporate lawyer, who had suffered from prostate cancer, served the shortest tenure of any leader in the 165-year history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

By tradition, Hunter will be succeeded by the church's senior apostle: 84-year-old Gordon B. Hinckley, a career church administrator. He will be ordained within a day or two of Hunter's funeral, which was not immediately set.

Hunter was the second-oldest man ever to become church president and the first born in this century.

During his ministry, Hunter eschewed the partisan politics of his ultraconservative predecessor, Ezra Taft Benson, a former U.S. agriculture secretary.

In his first public appearance as the church's 14th president in June, Hunter stressed the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. He also urged greater attendance at the church's 47 temples, which only faithful Mormons may enter.

``It would be the deepest desire of my heart to have every member of the church temple-worthy,'' he said.

Upon his death, President Clinton and Utah's all-Mormon congressional delegation and governor sent condolences.

Hunter was ``everything we think of as good, honest, compassionate and loving,'' a man who ``reached out to all, as did Christ, to reconcile people to the gospel,'' said Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch.

by CNB