UTAH – Thirty-five years after lifting a ban on blacks entering the priesthood, the Mormon church has offered an explanation for a practice that was in place for more than 100 years, saying it was rooted in the racism of the times.

A church-produced essay, “Race and the Priesthood,” ties the ban to an 1852 speech by Brigham Young, the faith’s second president, who led the church to Utah, and distances the modern Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from the policy.

“The justifications for restrictions echoed the widespread ideas about racial inferiority that had been used to argue for the legalization of black ‘servitude,'” reads the essay, part of a series aimed at giving Mormons more context for understanding various aspects of church history, practices and doctrine.

“Church leaders today unequivocally condemn all racism, past and present, in any form,” the essay says.

In the past, Mormon church leaders have said history provided no clear explanation for the prohibition that barred black men from ordination to the lay priesthood and prevented black men and women from participating in sacred temple rites.

In 1978 then-church President Spencer W. Kimball lifted the ban, citing what the church describes as a religious revelation, but the faith has had trouble shaking its history, and the issue of racism has arisen repeatedly, including during the 2012 presidential campaign of Mitt Romney, who is Mormon.

Mormon historian Newell Bringhurst applauded the essay as the most comprehensive statement on the priesthood ban ever issued by church leaders. Still Bringhurst, a retired professor of history and author of multiple books on the ban, said it should be viewed with skepticism.

“It’s a step forward, but I don’t think it’s adequate enough,” Bringhurst said. “They are going to have to own up to why it was perpetuated well into the civil rights era.”