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SALT LAKE CITY — President Russell M. Nelson, the pioneering heart surgeon whose second act as an apostle culminated in his 90s with leadership so vigorous and sweeping that his presidency forever transformed The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has died. He was 101.
“With sorrow we announce that Russell M. Nelson, beloved President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, passed away peacefully shortly after 10 p.m. MDT today at his home in Salt Lake City. He was 101 — the oldest president in the history of the Church," a church news release stated.
President Nelson’s more than seven years as the church’s 17th prophet-president were marked by the bridges he built, including a watershed collaboration with the NAACP, during a divisive era when other world leaders were unable or unwilling to work together.
He led the Church of Jesus Christ through the COVID-19 pandemic with hope and optimism, restructured its worship services and its ministering and launched it on a staggering course of temple-building that will continue for years beyond his death.
The church had six operating temples when he was born and 159 when he became president. He announced 200 more during his administration.
He was 93 at the beginning of his tenure, but set the rapid pace of a man who was an avid skier into his 10th decade. He galvanized the church during a dynamic first 100 days that included a general conference full of breathtaking announcements and a circumnavigation of the globe on a ministry tour with stops in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia and the Pacific.
President Nelson’s connection with church members
Those first days forged a deep and tender connection between President Nelson and church members around the world. They delighted in his age-defying vigor — he was born Sept. 9, 1924 — and his sense of humor. When he was 97, he cracked during a broadcast to young adults around the world that “at this point, I have stopped buying green bananas.”
He already had served as an apostle for 34 years, but church members quickly came to better know a prophet with the demeanor of gentleman from the past with an energetic vision for the future of the church and its members.
That vision was laser guided on encouraging them to follow Jesus Christ’s peacemaking example and to focus on accessing the everyday strengthening power he said Christ offered them through the covenants Latter-day Saints make in temples that bind them both to God and their families.
While speaking during general conference on April 7, 2024 — the 40th anniversary of the day the church sustained him to the apostleship in 1984 — he announced plans for 15 temples and called them “the gateway to the greatest blessings God has in store for each of us.”
“That is why we are doing all within our power, under the direction of the Lord, to make the temple blessings more accessible to members of the church,” he said.
In his 114th general conference talk in October 2024, he said, “Every sincere seeker of Jesus Christ will find him in the temple. You will feel his mercy. You will find answers to your most vexing questions. You will better comprehend the joy of his gospel.”
President Nelson’s ministry was truly international. He preached in more than 130 countries and dedicated 31 nations for the preaching of the gospel. He also more than doubled the church’s global humanitarian spending to more than $1.3 billion per year.
He was a family man, too. He and his late first wife of 59 years, Dantzel White Nelson, had 10 children, including nine daughters. After her death in 2005, he married Wendy Watson Nelson in 2006. He had 57 grandchildren and 168 great-grandchildren and one great-great-grandchild.
‘Contention is evil’
Blessed with the musical gift of perfect pitch, President Nelson taught and exemplified harmony, civility and unity in a discordant era beset by fractious social media discourse, nationalism and political division.
In contrast to that chaos, he became the inaugural laureate of the Gandhi-King-Mandela Peace Prize in April 2023. The honor came 11 days after he delivered a landmark talk on peacemaking at the 193rd Annual General Conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
“Make no mistake about it: Contention is evil!” he said. He remained adamant that people could change the world one interaction at a time by modeling “how to manage honest differences of opinion with mutual respect and dignified dialogue.”
He declared contention pointless and harmful even as many government leaders, influencers and media personalities cultivated controversy to drive their ambitions.
“Anger never persuades. Hostility builds no one. Contention never leads to inspired solutions ...” he said. “Contention reinforces the false notion that confrontation is the way to resolve differences; but it never is. Contention is a choice. Peacemaking is a choice. You have your agency to choose contention or reconciliation. I urge you to choose to be a peacemaker, now and always.”
He spoke from an expanded perspective as a centenarian who led the Latter-day Saints at the bicentennial of what its canon describes as the beginning of the Restoration of Christ’s church.
Changing the church
Among the many adjustments President Nelson spearheaded was a renewed emphasis on the proper name of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; he urged members and others not to use the term “Mormon” except in historical references, which led to the renaming of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
He also overhauled the church’s Sunday worship schedule, reducing the three-hour block to two hours; and introduced a home-centered, church-supported model of worship with new gospel study resources for home use.
While president, he became the oldest apostle and prophet in church history but hardly slowed. His son described him as “a cat on a hot tin roof” at the start of his administration. He regularly sat on the edge of his seat into his late 90s, posture perfect and a smile on his face. He appeared ready to spring to a pulpit or into action.
His colleagues in church leadership, who sat next to and worked with him for decades, said his backbone was ramrod straight, too, when it came to defending the church and its doctrines. Mostly, though, he inveighed listeners to improve their lives and outlooks by following Christ, regularly issuing international calls for gratitude, optimism and kindness.
The third person ever to perform a successful open-heart operation put down his scalpel upon his call to the apostleship and turned to healing hearts spiritually.
A legend in cardiothoracic surgery
Born in Salt Lake City and raised through the Depression, young Russell Nelson was a precocious learner who convinced his mother to let him ride a streetcar alone to the library so he could devour books. His high school a cappella choir director showed off his perfect pitch by calling on a member of an audience to hit a note on the piano. He identified each note.
A lifelong learner, Russell graduated from high school at 16, simultaneously earned bachelor and medical degrees at the University of Utah at 22, hired a tutor at age 54 to learn Mandarin Chinese when a prophet suggested it, and hired another tutor to learn enough Dutch to lead the Hosanna Shout at a temple dedication at age 63.
He married Dantzel White in 1945 and then set out with his young bride to seek a doctorate in medicine at the University of Minnesota, the hotbed of research into open-heart surgery. Operating on a live heart was listed as a medical sin in one of his textbooks.
He proved to be a gifted researcher for Clarence Dennis, who built a team to develop an artificial heart-lung bypass machine. It was a difficult innovation. When the team finally managed to sustain dogs briefly, they later died of a mysterious ailment.
Once, Dennis left President Nelson in charge of the lab while he left on an extended trip overseas. When Dennis returned, his protege had identified the problem. The lab’s cleaning process wasn’t eliminating bacteria. President Nelson developed a purification process.
The discovery and solution became the basis of his thesis and of multiple articles in medical journals. As a researcher, he published more than 70 peer-reviewed papers.
The heart-lung bypass machine allowed doctors to stop a patient’s heart and repair it. Blood flowing into the right atrium was rerouted to the machine next to the operating table, where an oxygenator stripped out carbon dioxide and delivered oxygen to the blood. Then the heart-lung machine returned the blood to the aorta, which sent it coursing to the patient’s brain, fingers and toes.
Dennis and a colleague used the team’s machine to perform the first open-heart operation on a human being in 1951. The patient died, but the principles were used in the first successful operation in 1953.
In 1955, President Nelson became first to perform an open-heart operation west of the Mississippi. He used an oxygenator he designed to make Utah the third U.S. state to host successful open-heart surgery. Dantzel helped sew parts for the machine.
In 1960, President Nelson developed tricuspid valve annuloplasty, an advanced surgical solution for tricuspid valve regurgitation, at about the same time as a California surgeon who worked independently.
“President Nelson is right up there along with the biggest legends in cardiothoracic surgery,” said Dr. Craig Selzman, professor of surgery and the surgical director of the Cardiac Mechanical Support and Heart Transplant program at the University of Utah.
Over the next two decades, he balanced his surgical practice and teaching with family and church duties, serving as a Temple Square missionary, a stake president overseeing multiple congregations and as general president of the Sunday School, which gave him responsibility for Sunday School classes throughout the world.
President Nelson had performed 7,000 operations and was at the height of his prowess before his surgical career ended with the call to serve as an apostle on April 7, 1984.
“The year before he was called to be an apostle, he performed 360 open heart operations and his mortality rate was about 1%,” said his biographer, Elder Spencer J. Condie, an emeritus General Authority Seventy.
He also helped train the next generation of surgeons as the University of Utah’s longest-acting director of the residency and fellowship training program for aspiring heart surgeons. He also traveled the world, training heart surgeons from Buenos Aires to Beijing.
President Nelson’s pledge to serve
President Nelson set the tone for his administration in a broadcast on Jan. 16, 2018, two days after he was set apart by other church leaders to succeed the late President Thomas S. Monson.
“I declare my devotion to God our Eternal Father, and to his Son, Jesus Christ,” President Nelson said. “I know them, love them and pledge to serve them — and you — with every remaining breath of my life.”
It wasn’t immediately clear outside church headquarters what form that would take until the annual general conference four months later. One leader described the electric conference as a rush of revelation.
President Nelson led off the conference by calling an Asian American and a Brazilian to the Quorum of the Twelve. Then he restructured priesthood quorums in every congregation and replaced the iconic home-teaching and visiting-teaching programs with a new concept of ministering. He concluded by drawing gasps of wonder when he announced seven new temples, including the first for India.
“President Nelson, I don’t know how many more rushes we can handle this weekend,” then-Elder Jeffrey R. Holland of the Quorum of the Twelve joked. “Some of us have weak hearts. But as I think about it, you can take care of that, too. What a prophet.”
He was just getting started. Days later, he embarked on his first international ministry tour.
“The Lord’s message is for everyone,” he told the Deseret News during his first stop in London. “This is a global work. Whenever I’m comfortably situated in my home, I’m in the wrong place. I need to be where the people are. We need to bring them the message of the Savior.”
