LDS Church to shut down Beneficial Life and get out of the life insurance business, eventually.

Mark Willes, president and CEO of Deseret Management Corp., said, “It’s completely tied to the meltdown in the financial markets which we face just like everybody else does.”

The Church’s business managers do plan to shut down Beneficial Life, eventually, but it will take more than a half-century to pull it off. That’s because the insurance company, with a skyscraper named after it in downtown Salt Lake, will stop selling new policies October 31. But they’re making a commitment to service existing policies, until the last beneficiary is gone.

Unfortunately, the layoffs start today.