Stokes Sounds Off: 06/02/19

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Sunday, June 2, 2019

Fortaleza Brazil Temple Dedicated As the 164th In Operation Worldwide

Hello again, everyone! This will just be a quick post to pass along what verification I have relating to the dedication of the Fortaleza Brazil Temple earlier today by Elder Ulisses Soares, our native Brazilian apostle. First, the Brazilian Newsroom on the Church's official website shared an article describing how Elder Soares, accompanied by the Brazil Area Presidency (Elders Marcos A. Aidukaitis, W. Mark Basset, and Adilson de Paula Parrella) met with several Brazilian journalists to discuss the history of the Church in Brazil, and to describe the purpose and significance of temples and the role that worship therein plays for members of the Church around the world.

That meeting with journalists was 1 of the 4 total meetings presided over by Elder Soares, excluding the temple dedication. The other 3 were with missionaries, pioneering members of the Church in Brazil, and with the Brazilian Saints (particularly the youth) for a devotional last night. Elder Soares took time to reminisce about his family's conversion to the Church, how his parents and many of his siblings were sealed in the temple while he was on his full-time mission, and how he was given permission to join other missionaries and their families (including his own) at the temple so the missionaries could receive their own endowments and also be sealed to their family members.

In presiding over the dedicatory services for the temple, Elder Soares became the first non-American apostle to dedicate a temple in his home country. The dedicatory sessions were also significant because they marked the first time all three sessions of the dedication for a new temple were conducted entirely in a language other than English (with sessions being conducted from beginning to end in their entirety in Portuguese). Elder Soares choked with emotion as he spoke of the honor he felt in having been assigned by President Nelson to personally preside at this event.

This was only the third temple dedication in which the dedicatory prayer was offered in a language other than English. The first was the September 2016 rededication for the Freiberg Germany Temple by then-President Dieter F. Uchtdorf, and the second was in April when Elder Dale G. Renlund gave the dedicatory prayer for the Kinshasa Democratic Republic of the Congo Temple in French.  And all who participated with Elder Soares were fluent in Portuguese.

Fellow Brazilians Elder Carlos A. Godoy, who serves in the Presidency of the Seventy, was there with his wife,, as were Elders Aidiukaitis and de Paula Parrella. The only non-native Brazilian leaders in attendance were Elders W. Mark Bassett, who learned Portuguese as a result of his full-time missionary service in Guatemala, and Elder Larry Y. Wilson, who serves as the Exectuive Director of the Temple Department, having served a full-time mission in Brazil.

And the temple dedication was significant to Elder Soares for another reason: he had had a major first-hand role in finding the site on which the temple was ultimately built. The traditional cornerstone ceremony was conducted by Elder Soares at the beginning of the first session, and in addition to other Church leaders who joined him in placing mortar were several children in the congregation, in addition to some of the pioneering members of the Church in Brazil. I am grateful to have been able to find this report and bring it to you here.

I am hoping that within the next 12 hours or less, subsequent reports on this weekend's dedicatory events will be shared on both the main Newsroom and the Brazilian edition of that same page. Once I have those reports, I will be sure to pass them along here. That does it for this post. Any and all comments are, as always, welcome and appreciated, on any post at any time, as long as such comments are made in accordance with the established guidelines.

Thank you for the privilege of your time. If you enjoyed what you read here and would like to stay informed of newly-added content, please feel free to subscribe. Until my next post, I wish each one of you all the best and pray that the Lord will bless you all in everything you do.