How the LDS Church Came to Spain;
or,
C’mon, you don’t believe in coincidence, either.
This story used to appear earlier in this account, but I’ve finally arrived where it belongs. It’s a miracle story about people, some still living. I watched some of it happen, in visits to Madrid and from a peripheral home base at the Mission Home in Paris; while we still had him with us, Pappy supplied other pieces.
Since sharing the story around, I’ve been in touch with folks who know it better and from other angles. Rather than rewrite and obscure my errors, I’m highlighting them, gratefully, with footnotes: they illustrate uncommonly well the fallibility of first-hand testimony, especially when it has had time to ripen and evolve in the fading mind of an old storyteller. I plead guilty to interpreting the facts overenthusiastically, and also to losing track of the distinction between fact and interpretation. Like my improved sources, though, I remain amazed at the Lord’s hand in what we persist in seeing as our affairs.
In June 1967, President H Duane Anderson took command of the French Mission of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; in addition to more than 200 missionaries, he undertook ecclesiastical responsibility for congregations (branches and districts) in much of France and in an area including Spain, Portugal, the Azores, and North Africa. But his missionaries were restricted to France proper, and the only congregations we had in those broader areas were on American military bases.
Concurrent Miracle #1:
As I heard it, several Air Force officers1 rotated in 1967 from Vietnam to Torrejon Air Base, outside Madrid. Having served Spanish-language missions in Latin America, they were unwilling to slide by default into the usual Yankee-expatriate groove and instead went into the city and made friends among the locals. Among their earliest contacts was José Oliveira, a prominent lawyer married to Patricia Wright Graff, who had brought two2 teenaged sons from her first marriage.
(More, next page)
1Majors, lieutenant colonels: Valerie and I met Sterling Nixon and Dean Hunger and their wives, and, I think, the Halls. I think it was the Hungers who graciously brought home our Toledo broadsword (named Runcible) in their luggage. The folks talked a lot about all of them and left some photos.
2Her son Patrick informs me that she had four; one, Jonathan, already a returned missionary who served in Scotland and later taught José Oliveira.
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