A day after his historic meeting with a white-cassocked Pope Francis in unfamiliar surroundings inside the Vatican, a white-suited President Russell M. Nelson found himself Sunday in a familiar setting to perform a very familiar task: dedicate a new Latter-day Saint temple.
But this temple, the faith’s 162nd operating one around the globe, is significant not so much for how it looks but for where it sits — in northeast Rome, the Eternal City, the capital of Catholicism, the scriptural site where ancient apostles Peter and Paul preached.
Nelson, the 94-year-old leader of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, noted those biblical ties during his dedicatory prayer.