| 
A Promised Day Arrived
The Helsinki Finland Temple Dedication, Part 2
Text by Maurine
Jensen Proctor
Photos by Scot Facer Proctor
From Small Beginnings
The Helsinki Finland temple was announced 2
April, 2000, but it has been in the eternal works since the first
missionaries came here from Sweden in 1875 at great personal cost.
Click on Photos to Enlarge
The Church in Scandinavia was harangued by most
of the trials and drama its counterpart in the United States faced.
“William A. Wilson and Hannele Blomquist Wilson wrote in We
Remember, that members were “ridiculed by the press, beaten
by mobs, harassed by government officials, imprisoned on bread and
water diets, preached against by the local clergy and driven from
the land.”
The gospel was called “a fraud which for
the most part is spread and preached by those who themselves know
it to be deceptive.” Carl A. Sundstrom and his brother John
E. Sundstrom, two local Swedish members were called to serve in
Finland, but religious freedom was in a stranglehold at the time.
Every Finn was required to belong either to the Lutheran or Orthodox
Church.
Still, these first missionaries were undaunted.
The law forbade any from “rising to speak” so they taught
the gospel sitting down and gained a handful of converts.. They
were replaced by Axel Tullgren, the first missionary to Finland
from Utah who reported to his Scandinavian mission president that
he and his companion had been harassed by the local clergy and that
a government authority had threatened to send them to Siberia if
they didn’t cease preaching.
“It is not certain,” wrote Elder
Tullgren, “how long we will be free of foot because the police
can arrest us at any time…But through the help of the Lord,
we are patient and will endure whatever we encounter.”
Swedish missionary Johan Blom, who was persuaded
by the Stockholm district president to move with his family to Finland
to preach the gospel was immediately arrested for baptizing on Sunday
and for preaching against the Lutheran Church. He was tried, found
guilty, and sentenced to 28 days in jail on bread and water.
In the 1880s, “the Book of Mormon was
often confiscated by the police, along with other church literature.
Because they had been instructed to “let no Mormon papers
into Finland,” Finnish postal authorities even opened packages
of the church publication, Nordstjarnan, removed the magazines and
sent only empty wrappers on to subscribers.”
Still, missionaries knew great success, until
the mid 1880’s when the government bore down so hard that
missionaries had to leave the country. Without contact with the
missionaries, many fell away, but there were Saints there Anders
Johansson who had felt the gospel in his very “bones and marrow”
who would go into the woods and pray for comfort.
The gospel sputtered in Finland during the two
world wars and finally in July of 1946, Elder Ezra Taft Benson of
the Council of the Twelve came to Finland and rededicated the land
for the preaching of the gospel.
When Elder Benson returned from Finland, President
McKay told him, “Brother Benson, you’re going to have
to find a mission president. I don’t know of anyone in this
Church who speaks Finnish.”
Then on his way home from Jacksonville, Florida,
he and Sister Benson had to stop in Chicago to attend another conference.
On the way he stopped in Indianapolis where he got out of the train
to stretch his legs, being assured by the porter that he had a 15
minute window before the train left again.
But as they returned to the platform, they saw
the tail end of the train as it drove out of the station. He didn’t
have enough money to buy an airplane ticket and the stationmaster
wouldn’t cash a check.
Then Elder Benson remembered an old friend who
lived in that city, whom he called and told of their plight. The
friend arrived with his “pockets full of money” and
the Bensons boarded a flight to Chicago. “On the way to the
airport,” said Elder Benson, “I sent a telegram to the
president of the Chicago Stake and asked that someone meet the plane
and the train because all of our things were on the train…
“As we arrived in Chicago, we met Brother
[Henry] Matis, a counselor in the stake presidency. My wife, true
to that womanly inquisitiveness, started asking him questions as
soon as we started driving, such as where he came from, what he
did etc. Then we learned that he and his family had lived in a little
Finnish community in Colorado. Brother Matis, as a young man, took
the orders for groceries by telephone, and sometimes he would have
to talk in Finnish, sometimes in English, so he had to keep up on
the Finnish language.
“That’s how we found Brother Matis,
and that’s how the Lord directed us…I wired President
McKay, “I’ve found the president for the Finnish Mission.”
The Lord extended a tender mercy for the Matises.
During the war Mae Pace Matis, Henry’s wife, had been in charge
of a Relief Society project to create six quilts to aid the Saints
in ravaged Europe where suffering was intense. It must have been
a temptation to make only five when there wasn’t enough fabric,
but Sister Matis carefully pieced a quilt together out of the scraps
from the others.
The quilt must have sat in a warehouse somewhere
because when they arrived in Finland, the Matises were without most
of their goods which had been stolen somewhere enroute. They were
suffering themselves when in 1947, that last quilt Sister Matis
had made was sent to them to keep them warm against the Finnish
blasts of winter.
Housing was short in post-war Finland,
and most Church and mission activities centered around a five-room
apartment on the fourth floor of a building without an elevator.
Here was housed the mission office, the branch meeting place, missionary
living quarters and six members of the Matis family—all with
one bathroom, no hot water, and a small kitchen with two electrical
heating plates.
Patriarch Savolanain remembers when all the
members had to sit on the floor for Church because there were no
chairs.
Click
here to go to Part 3 of A Promised Day Arrived
|
