Thomas S. Monson — Prophetic Promise to the Czech Saints

In 1985, Elder Thomas S. Monson of the First Presidency visited the small band of Latter-day Saints in Communist Czechoslovakia — fewer than a hundred members, scattered and watched, among them the families of Otakar Vojkůvka and Olga Kovářová Campora. He met with them in a private Prague apartment, the only kind of Church gathering the regime tolerated, and gave them an apostolic promise: if they would remain faithful, the day would come when religious freedom would return to their nation and the Church would no longer have to meet in shadows. At the time, with the Communist secret police active and public worship forbidden, the promise seemed humanly impossible.

Five years later — after the Velvet Revolution of 1989 peacefully swept away the regime — the Church was officially granted legal recognition by the Czechoslovak state in February 1990, and Elder Monson (by then a member of the First Presidency) returned to the country. Missionaries re-entered, and the Church emerged from forty years of hiding. The members who had kept the faith through the dark decades regarded the recognition as the fulfillment of the apostolic promise made in their little apartment meeting.

Research note: No verbatim first-person excerpt of Elder Monson's 1985 promise is available in a public archival source, so none is reproduced here. The promise and its fulfillment are documented in Olga Kovářová Campora, "Fruits of Faithfulness: The Saints of Czechoslovakia," in Women Steadfast in Christ (Deseret Book, 1992), 134–147, written by one of the Czech Saints who lived through both the promise and its fulfillment; and in "A Decade of Peace: The Church in the Czech Republic," Ensign, July 2000.