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God did not send Hurricane Katrina as a punishment to the people of New Orleans, LDS Church President Gordon B. Hinckley said Saturday.
"Many good people, including some of our faithful Latter-day Saints, are among those who suffered," Hinckley said during the evening session of the church's 175th Semiannual General Conference. "We know, of course, that the rain falls on the just as well as the unjust."
Hinckley, considered a "prophet, seer and revelator" to members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was speaking from the 21,000 seat LDS Conference Center in downtown Salt Lake City to the priesthood session, which is open only to males 12 and older. Thousands of other Mormons watched the day's proceedings in LDS chapels across the globe via satellite, television or the Internet.
"This old world is no stranger to calamities," Hinckley said in his Saturday evening speech, providing a litany of disasters from the Black Plague of the 14th century, to the Chicago fire, tidal waves that swamped areas of Hawaii, the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, the 1900 hurricane in Galveston, Texas, that killed 8,000 and last year's tsunami in Southeast Asia.
"We can heed warnings," Hinckley said, such as by Utah's own seismologists who have predicted an earthquake in Salt Lake City. "Our people for three quarters of a century have been counseled and encouraged to make such preparation as will assure survival should a calamity come."
Other speakers Saturday used the recent hurricane as a metaphor for the spiritual storms that beset humanity.
Elder M. Russell Ballard spoke of visiting evacuee centers in Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas as part of the church's relief efforts. Such crises always cause people to reflect on what matters most. To the church it is the family, he said.
This year marks the 10th anniversary of the "Proclamation on the Family," which lays out the church's views on the roles of men and women, their eternal relationship, and their responsibility to care for children.
Ballard blasted views of the family that see it as "any individuals of any gender who live together with or without commitment or children or attention to consequences."
Mormons have opposed efforts to legalize same-sex marriage in Alaska, Hawaii and California, as well as in other states.
Ballard called on public institutions, the media, government and political leaders, Internet providers, educational entities and all Latter-day Saints to focus on the well-being of children and to defend and protect the traditional family.
Elder Dallin H. Oaks explored the relationship between men and women, as the church has an all-male priesthood.
Men are not "the priesthood," Oaks said, alluding to a common parlance in the church. "The priesthood is the power of God used to bless all his children, men and women."
There are cultures and traditions in some parts of the world that allow men to oppress women, he said, but they "must not be carried into the families of the Church of Jesus Christ."
Sister Susan Tanner, president of the Young Women's organization, focused her remarks on society's misconceptions about the body.
"Satan tempts many to defile this great gift of the body through unchastity, immodesty, self-indulgence and addictions," Tanner said. "He seduces some to despise their bodies; others he tempts to worship their bodies. In either case, he entices the world to regard the body merely as an object."
Tanner condemned "a selfish excess of exercising, dieting, makeovers and spending money on the latest fashions."
Apostle Jeffrey R. Holland urged young women not to "slavishly follow the whims of fads and fashions."
They should avoid clothing that is too tight, too short or improperly revealing in any manner, including bare midriffs, Holland said.
Young women should dress respectfully for church, he said; "Clothing or footwear should not be expensive, but neither should it appear that we are on our way to the beach."
Some women are setting bad examples for their daughters and other teens, he said. "If adults are preoccupied with appearance - implanting and tucking and nipping and remodeling everything that can be remodeled - those pressures and anxieties will most certainly seep through to children."
He urged young women to accept themselves and their bodies, shape and style and not try to look like someone else.
"One would truly need a 'great and spacious' makeup kit to compete with beauty as portrayed in the media all around us," Holland said. "Yet at the end of the day there would still be those 'in the attitude of mocking and pointing their fingers,' as [The Book of Mormon] says, because however much one tries in the world of glamour, it will never be enough."
The conference resumes today.