Good Principles

On February 8, 1990, Romania’s newly installed democratic government was just beginning to rebuild the country when Elder Russell M. Nelson of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles arrived in Bucharest. He was accompanied by Elder Hans B. Ringger, an Area Seventy, and Peter Berkhahn, the director for temporal affairs for the Church in Eastern Europe. After a brief visit to Cișmigiu Park, where Elder Nelson offered a prayer for the land of Romania, the trio met with government officials and asked how the Church could help. “Many are helping, but you are the first ones to ask us what we really need,” one hospital director told them.

Romania’s huge population of orphans posed a particularly urgent problem. Senior missionaries with medical and other special skills were called to lead service projects in the country. Members throughout Europe provided funding, food, medical supplies, and clothing for children in need.

Many Church members from abroad also independently chose to adopt Romanian orphans. When one such family, the Worselys, was visiting Romania to finalize the adoption, they invited their Romanian guide, Octavian Vasilescu, to attend Church services with them. Like many Romanians, Vasilescu knew little about religion. “Our parents were afraid to teach us about Jesus Christ and His gospel because Communism in the 1950s and 1960s was very bad in Bucharest,” he later observed. “Our parents learned what fear is. We learned what fear is.” Despite the ideas about religion that had always surrounded him, however, Vasilescu found himself drawn to the Latter-day Saints. “I felt a good spirit in that meeting,” he said. “I thought, ‘These people have good principles.’” He asked for a copy of the Book of Mormon afterward.

On March 24, 1991, Vasilescu was baptized along with Doina Biolaru and Camelia Ionescu. That summer, the first branch in modern Romania was organized with Vasilescu as branch president and Biolaru as Relief Society president.