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How the Latter-day Saints Opened Their First Temple in Europe

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How the Latter-day Saints Opened Their First Temple in Europe

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

On September 11, 1955, church president David O. McKay dedicated the Bern Switzerland Temple, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' first temple built in Europe. It was only the church's second temple built outside North America, following the Laie Hawaii Temple, dedicated in 1919.

The new temple served a membership spread across several European countries speaking different languages, a challenge earlier temples serving a single mostly English speaking membership had not faced in the same way. Rather than staff live ceremonies in each language separately, the Bern temple pioneered presenting its ceremonies on film, dubbed into each of the languages its members spoke.

That solution proved lasting well beyond Bern itself. Every later Latter-day Saint temple built anywhere in the world went on to adopt filmed, dubbed ceremony presentation, the same approach the Bern Switzerland Temple had introduced to solve its own multilingual European membership's needs.

What the 1955 dedication changed for the Latter-day Saints' spread was giving Europe its own temple for the first time and, in solving how to serve that temple's multilingual membership, changing how every Latter-day Saint temple built anywhere afterward would present its own ceremonies.

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Sources
Bern Switzerland Temple (Wikipedia)
Wikipedia contributors, Wikipedia, 2026View the Source
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