"I am embarrassed to say that was the first time I learned about Nauvoo and the details of what happened," Burke said. "I thought that, No. 1, the people of Illinois ought to know more about their own history and, No. 2, it's a travesty that's gone on for too many years."

So Burke turned to his brother, Illinois State Rep. Dan Burke, D-Chicago. The resolution, he said, "has the possibility to heal some of the lingering hurt that I'm sure many descendants of the original settlers of Nauvoo feel about Illinois."

And last month, Burke and his wife, Illinois Appellate Court Judge Anne Burke, returned to Utah with a draft of the resolution that they took to President Hinckley. "He was completely surprised that anyone would undertake to do this," Burke said. "He was very emotional."

Dan Burke said there was no debate over the resolution, either in committee or on the House floor, and that it passed unanimously. The resolution also received virtually no attention in Illinois until Wednesday, when a Chicago Sun-Times columnist wrote about it.

The Burkes are Catholics, and Anne Burke is the chairwoman of the Catholic Church's national panel charged with examining allegations of sexual abuse by priests. The resolution's chief sponsor, Illinois State Rep. Jack Franks, D-Woodstock, is Jewish.

Taylor Manning of Naperville, a Chicago suburb, one of the 50,000 LDS Church members in Illinois, said the apology says a lot about Ed and Anne Burke "and the impact the Mormon story had on them. It just feels great."

Today, Nauvoo is a popular tourist destination for LDS Church members and others. The temple, gutted by arson in 1848, was rebuilt by the LDS Church and dedicated in 2002.

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Read the entire resolution here.

E-mail: lisa@desnews.com