SALT LAKE CITY — President Jeffrey R. Holland, an engaging scholar who led Brigham Young University through the 1980s and spent the past 31 years as a beloved apostle of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, died Saturday, Dec. 27, 2025, at 3:15 a.m. of complications associated with kidney disease. He was 85.
President Holland capped his personable international ministry by spending his final 25 months as acting president and then president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. He cherished the opportunity both as another way to serve God and as a tender mercy extended by heaven after he spent a month unconscious in a hospital “on the doorstep of death” in 2023.
“The miracle that I represent with the restoration of my life is as real as any miracle in the Old Testament or the New Testament or the Doctrine and Covenants or the Book of Mormon. Miracles still exist,” he said during his first international trip in his new role.
As BYU’s president his optimism, scholarship, vibrant faith in Jesus Christ and vigorous defenses of the church influenced tens of thousands of students. His subsequent calling as an apostle widened his influence to millions.
He felt his mission was to provide hope so those who needed it could “keep believing until hope’s sister virtues of faith and charity can also work their miracles.”
As an apostle in a restorationist faith, President Holland relished that his 10th great-grandfather was Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island and champion of religious liberty who determined that the true New Testament church no longer existed, that priesthood authority had been lost and that the world should wait for the coming of new apostles.
“Roger Williams did not live to see those longed-for new apostles raised up, but in a future time I hope to be able to tell him personally that his posterity did live to see such,” President Holland wrote in one of his 14 books, “Broken Things to Mend.”
President Holland’s passing creates two vacancies. Church President Dallin H. Oaks will call President Henry B. Eyring, first counselor in the First Presidency, as the president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles with President Dieter F. Uchtdorf assuming the role as the quorum’s acting president. President Oaks will also call a new apostle to fill the quorum’s 12th seat.
Funeral services for President Holland are pending.
‘A pastoral genius’
President Holland was revered by Latter-day Saints as an educator with a powerful, soaring oratorical style infused with his Yale education and his fervent faith in Jesus Christ.
His big, ready, welcoming smile and ebullience, combined with his scholarship, scripture mastery and warmth led an Oxford theologian, the Rev. Andrew Teal, to call President Holland “a pastoral genius.”
He could thunder with conviction and weep with tenderness and often did both, especially when he spoke about a loving Heavenly Father, Christ or the Book of Mormon, which he said was the original source of his faith.
“I live by the words of the Book of Mormon,” he said last year. “... It is the most profound book in my life. I went to school reading classics, as it were, some things more than once, but not very often. The number of books … I have bothered to read more than once could be counted on one hand. Well, I have read the Book of Mormon 100 times and loved it.”
President Holland served as BYU’s president from 1980-89. During that time, he was a key figure in Israel for the approval and construction of the BYU Jerusalem Center. Afterward, he served in the church’s Young Men general presidency and as a General Authority Seventy.
He was called to the apostleship on June 23, 1994, by President Howard W. Hunter.
“My chief responsibility now, and my primary responsibility — in a sense, my total responsibility — is to bear witness of the Lord Jesus Christ,” President Holland said then. “As inadequate as I feel, it is the most pleasant and most rewarding and most thrilling assignment a man can have in this world. I pledge my life to this effort.”
‘A teacher sent from God’
President Holland delivered 64 addresses at the church’s international general conferences.
“He has been so eloquent, so loving and expressive, and he has spoken so well about the Savior Jesus Christ,” Elder Ulisses Soares of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles once told the Deseret News. “That always impressed me and touched my heart, and I always felt so inclined to be better because of his influence in my life.”
President Holland was called and set apart as acting president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles on Nov. 15, 2023, after the death of his friend, President M. Russell Ballard. He was ordained as president of the quorum in October 2025 after the death of President Russell M. Nelson and the subsequent calling of President Dallin H Oaks as president of the Church.
After President Oaks was sustained as leader of the church, President Holland bore witness of his prophetic calling.
“We unequivocally sustain President Oaks as the prophet, seer and revelator leading this church for its next moment in time,” he wrote on social media. “We love him, we have known him, we have watched him be prepared. We have had the confirmation that that is the Lord’s will and that has been unanimous and a very moving experience to see that mantle come completely on President Oaks. We stand ready to serve him out to the newest convert and the most recently called missionary.
“I know beyond anything else I know that this is God’s church. This is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Father and the Son and the gifts of the Holy Ghost will come upon President Oaks in full measure.”
President Holland highlighted the “covenant path,” in sermons and testimony to describe the Latter-day Saint belief in a course to eternal life with God through the ordinances of baptism, confirmation, temple endowment and temple sealing or marriage. He also shared his own experience with the mental health challenge of depression.
“He was, like the scripture said of Christ, ‘a teacher sent from God,’” said his lifelong friend and fellow BYU administrator and church leader, Elder Bruce C. Hafen, an emeritus General Authority Seventy. “I think the church and others came to know that, but that’s been in him all along. He developed it, and was given opportunities to develop it, and he had this extraordinary gift to connect with people and to give encouragement and to give empathy and understanding with his delightful sense of humor.”
“It’s like the whole church became his classroom,” Elder Hafen said. “He was a teacher, and the modern media allowed him to teach at conference, and we were all in his classroom.”
While BYU’s president, he taught Book of Mormon classes. As an apostle, he taught the subject to global audiences, punctuated by a dynamic, emotional and forceful general conference talk in 2009, when he said the Book of Mormon is “safety for the soul.”
“I ask that my testimony of the Book of Mormon and all that it implies, given today under my own oath and office, be recorded by men on earth and angels in heaven ...,” he said. “I want it absolutely clear when I stand before the judgment bar of God that I declared to the world, in the most straightforward language I could summon, that the Book of Mormon is true.”
A high school star
President Holland was born Dec. 3, 1940, to Frank Holland and Alice Bentley Holland in St. George, Utah. One side of his family was made up of Mormon pioneers, including an apostle, President George Q. Cannon, who was the brother of his great-great-grandmother. The other side, the Holland side, “were a rowdy-but-lovable bunch of Roman Catholic miners born in Ireland,” President Holland once said.
“This will help you all understand the many peculiarities and various peccadilloes in me,” he said. “If I seem to be on any given day (or in any given general conference) sort of a smiling, Irish, hail-fellow-well-met, the-world-is-my-oyster sort of chap and a rock-ribbed, no-nonsense, it-is-the-kingdom-of-God-or-nothing Latter-day Saint in the next instant, it is because I come by that mix rightly with that kind of blood coursing through my veins.”
He earned the Eagle Scout Award and worked as a paperboy, grocery bagger and service station attendant, but he also was the “fun-loving, active, mischievous boy” who used to sneak in and ring the bell at the Pine Valley Chapel during meetings. He rang that bell again at the chapel’s rededication in 2005.
President Holland grew up as a football and basketball star with a desire to become a doctor. He played a key role in winning a few games as the backup quarterback in the fall of 1957 as Dixie High School won the state football championship, then he started at point guard that winter as the school won the 1957-58 state basketball championship. Both the football and basketball teams were undefeated that year.
“He was very bright. He was a very good play caller,” said Richard Lee Hafen, who was the starting quarterback in President Holland’s junior year. “He could throw the ball and he could run. Jeff was a very good ball handler in basketball, a passer. He could shoot well, too, but like he was in life, he was a floor leader, he was the guy that set up the plays.”
As a senior, President Holland started at quarterback and again led the Dixie High basketball team to the state final. He also lettered in track and baseball.
“The central joy of my life while I was growing up was sports,” President Holland once said. “I played on every kind of team that could have been assembled.”
“I don’t know why I did,” he told the Deseret News. “Nobody in my family did, but I lived for it. And every season, every sport.”
On the sideline for his high school games was a cheerleader named Pat Terry, whose family moved to St. George as she was reaching high school age. The two started dating when he was 17 and she was 16.
The cheerleader and turning points
“Pat came from a very missionary-oriented family,” President Holland said after he was called as an apostle in 1994. “And from the beginning of our courtship there was no question in her mind that I would go on a mission. I was already planning to go, but my desire was also fostered by Pat. By the time I was 19, wild horses could not have restrained me from going.”
His service in what then was called the British Mission from 1960-62 altered the trajectory of his life. President Holland called it “the major spiritual turning point of my life — the beginning of my beginnings.”
He grew close to and was deeply influenced by his mission president.
“Elder Marion D. Hanks had come to England as a very young general authority to be our mission president,” President Holland would say. “He used the Book of Mormon from daylight to dark with the missionaries. It became our text and missionary guide.”
President Holland developed a deep love for the United Kingdom and its role in Latter-day Saint history.
He served in a mission companionship with Elder Quentin L. Cook. The two reunited later as colleagues in the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.
President Holland called the United Kingdom “the salvation of the church” in the late 1830s, when it was under threat in Ohio and most of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles was sent to England on a mission. “That gesture ... that movement through northern Europe, saved this church, numerically and statistically and in terms of the faith and the devotion and service of its people,” he said.
In 2018, President Holland traveled to London as an apostle himself to meet with Prime Minister Theresa May. He provided her with leather-bound copies of the Book of Mormon and her family history.
“We have never had a day in Parliament like today,” he said. “You do not get many meetings with prime ministers. As a 19-year-old missionary here, I wanted to get in any door at all. I never thought a day would come when I would get in the door at Parliament or to the office of the prime minister.”
His mission service was a career turning point, too. He abandoned thoughts of becoming a doctor because of a spiritual prompting that he should be a teacher.
From then on, his brother Dennis once said, “All Jeff ever wanted to do was teach the gospel to students in a classroom. I was always sure that the Lord had the same goal in mind for him, but that the size of the classroom and the number of students were on a much grander scale than he was envisioning.”
From ‘hayseeds’ to Yale and leadership roles
President Holland returned home to co-captain the basketball team at Dixie College (now Utah Tech University); the team won a conference championship. Then he married Pat Terry in the St. George Temple on June 7, 1963. They have three children — Elder Matthew S. Holland, Mary Alice Holland McCann and David Holland — 13 grandchildren and several great-grandchildren.
Today, Utah Tech students gather in the Jeffrey R. Holland Centennial Commons Building, which honors President Holland and the school’s 2011 centennial.
The Hollands enrolled together at BYU as terrified “little hayseeds from St. George, Utah,” with no money, Sister Holland once said. One day early in their first semester, President Holland wondered aloud to her if they should quit school and he should go to work without a college education.
“She grabbed me by the lapels and said, ‘We are not going back. We are not going home. The future holds everything for us,’” President Holland wrote. “She stood there in the sunlight that day and gave me a real talk.”
President Holland completed multiple graduate degrees, beginning with a master’s in religious instruction at BYU, where he taught religion part time while studying. His thesis was “An analysis of selected changes in major editions of the Book of Mormon, 1830-1920.” Upon graduation, he was hired as an institute teacher in the Church Educational System in Hayward, California.
He proved to be a precocious scholar and leader. When the Hollands moved to Seattle for an institute job, he became a bishop at age 27, then went on to be an institute director at 31, managing director of the Melchizedek Priesthood MIA program at 32, dean of Religious Education at BYU at 33, commissioner of church education at 35 and president of BYU at 39.
While at BYU as a master’s student, he had opened a Yale University catalog and felt prompted that one day he would go there. A Yale-educated professor at the University of Washington recommended him for Yale’s American Studies program, and the Hollands embarked in 1970 on what he called “our naive expedition to New Haven,” Connecticut. There at Yale, President Holland earned a master’s of philosophy in American studies in 1972 and a Ph.D. in American Studies the next year. His dissertation was titled, “Mark Twain’s religious sense: The viable years, 1835-1883.”
The BYU Jerusalem Center
President Holland also engaged in significant outreach.
The BYU Jerusalem Center faced fierce opposition in Israel’s government, the media and among the public. As BYU’s president, he bore the brunt of the protests against the center’s construction on Mount Scopus, where it looks out over the Mount of Olives, the Kidron Valley and the Old City.
Opponents fought the building permit. At one point when the Knesset was deadlocked, one political party offered its votes in the Israeli parliament to whatever majority would move the Latter-day Saints off Mount Scopus. In 1985, the government declared a non-proselytizing agreement was necessary to continue construction.
The First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles signed the agreement. BYU students, visitors to the center and local Latter-day Saints have abided by the non-proselytizing restrictions for almost four decades.
President Holland traveled to Israel to deliver the agreement and kick off an intensive effort to make clear the church was not building a missionary center. The tide turned, the Israeli government ruled in 1986 that BYU had the right to build the center, and it was dedicated in May 1989. President Holland once listed 33 miracles that made the center possible.
“I do not use the word ‘miracle’ lightly,” President Holland said. “I’m in a calling and I’m in a quorum that does not use the word lightly but knows what it means and knows the significance of when we’ve seen one.”
For his work in improving understanding between Christians and Jews, President Holland received the “Torch of Liberty” award by the Anti-Defamation League of B’Nai B’rith.
Inside his call to the apostleship
In 1980, as church commissioner of education, he was assigned to compile a list of candidates to replace President Dallin H. Oaks as BYU’s president. But within days, he was called into a meeting with the First Presidency.
Church President Spencer W. Kimball told him he was to be BYU’s ninth president.
“President Kimball, you’ve got to be joking!” he said. President Kimball answered wryly, “Brother Holland, in this room, we don’t joke very much.”
He cherished his nine years as BYU’s president, especially when the Cougar football team won the 1984 national championship. President Holland spearheaded a campus fundraising campaign that brought in $115 million. He also served as the president of the American Association of Presidents of Independent Colleges and Universities, and as a member of the NCAA’s presidents’ committee and the board of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities.
“I have loved BYU for nearly three-fourths of a century,” he told a campus audience in 2021. “Only my service in and testimony of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which includes and features foremost my marriage and the beautiful children it has given us, only these have affected me as profoundly as has my decision to attend Brigham Young University. ... In so testifying, I represent literally hundreds of thousands of other students who made that same decision and who say the same thing.”
His BYU presidency ended in April 1989 with a call to leave academics and begin a full-time ministry as a member of the church’s First Quorum of the Seventy. Five years later, after the death of church President Ezra Taft Benson, his assignment changed again.
The new church leader, President Howard W. Hunter, with whom he’d worked closely on the BYU Jerusalem Center, asked President Holland to meet him at 7:30 a.m. on June 23, 1994, before the weekly meeting of the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve.
By midday, President Hunter had called President Holland to serve in the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, introduced him to the quorum and set him apart and ordained him. President Holland was 53, the youngest member of the quorum. Since then, only one apostle has been younger at the time of his call, Elder David A. Bednar, who was 52 when called in 2004.
“I’m not sure you can understand the overwhelming sense of responsibility this call brings,” President Holland said then. “I’m equally sure you could not understand the unspeakable respect that I have for the office” of apostle.
President Holland’s teachings
President Holland said he had a desire “to live up to the standard that the entire Christian world holds for the title ‘apostle.’”
“I pledge,” he said at the beginning of his service, “everything I have and everything I know how to give to witnessing the divinity of the Savior’s life and the restoration of his gospel. My greatest joy and my solemn obligation is to testify of Jesus Christ wherever I may go and with whomever I may be for as long as I shall live.”
As an international church leader, he consistently and vigorously encouraged church members to hold to hope and faith. He taught that the Book of Mormon “was given to bring happiness and hope to the faithful in the travail of the latter days.”
He revered the presidents of the church, whom he taught were living prophets of God.
“We feel about having a prophet’s leadership as someone felt of the rising sun — that if it came but once a year instead of every day, oh, what would be the anticipation! We thank thee, O God, for a prophet,” he wrote.
In a dynamic 2003 sermon, he made a spirited, heartfelt plea for the world to see God as loving and warm instead of what he believed was a global misperception of Heavenly Father as not only stern, angry or vengeful but as “unknown and unknowable — formless, passionless, elusive, ethereal, simultaneously everywhere and nowhere at all.” He believed the misconceptions were caused by man-made creeds and misreadings and mistranslations of the Bible.
Instead, President Holland taught, the Father is a perfect and caring God whose character was reflected in his son’s merciful, gracious and compassionate ministry and Atonement.
“In that sense,” he said, “Jesus did not come to improve God’s view of man nearly so much as he came to improve man’s view of God and to plead with them to love their Heavenly Father as he has always and will always love them.”
He repeatedly and often poetically described the gospel of Jesus Christ as the answer to turmoil.
“Peace and good tidings; good tidings and peace,” he taught. “These are among the ultimate blessings that the gospel of Jesus Christ brings a troubled world and the troubled people who live in it — solutions to personal struggles and human sinfulness, a source of strength for days of weariness and hours of genuine despair.”
One of his last conference talks returned to the theme the Restoration.
“The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a restoration of true Christian beginnings,” he said in October 2022, adding that “being neither Catholic nor Protestant, we are, rather, a restored church, the restored New Testament Church.”
In that talk, he also reiterated why the church generally doesn’t use the symbol of the cross, using some of his signature vivid and vigorous language.
“It has to do, rather, with the rock-ribbed integrity and stiff moral backbone that Christians should bring to the call Jesus has given to every one of his disciples,” President Holland said. “In every land and age, he has said to us all, “If any man [or woman] will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.”
“We follow him everywhere,” he added, “including, if necessary, into arenas filled with tears and trouble, where sometimes we may stand very much alone.”
In October 2024, President Holland reiterated his role as a witness for Jesus Christ.
“I testify that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the vehicle God has provided for our exaltation,” he said. “The gospel it teaches is true, and the priesthood legitimizing it is not derivative.”
A loss and a miracle
President Holland began to struggle in recent years with his health, first with neuropathy, or nerve issues, in his back. Kidney problems followed.
In 2020, he was hospitalized for a week. He was told he might not walk again and needed intensive physical therapy. He began to use a cane.
“I wrote Jeff a little note then and said that his presence in this world is really needed now,” said his former high school quarterback, Richard Lee Hafen.
In April 2023, he and his wife of 60 years, Patricia, missed general conference because of COVID-19 complications. Days later, the church announced President Holland would step away from church service temporarily to focus on his health and dialysis treatments. He returned to his apostolic assignments two months later.
Then, on July 20, 2023, Sister Holland died. President Holland attended her funeral on July 28 and the graveside service the next day. He called her “the greatest woman I have ever known” and said he was heartbroken.
Five days later, on Aug. 3, President Holland was hospitalized for observation and treatment of “health complications,” a church statement said. Soon, he was unconscious. President Ballard and Elder Dale G. Renlund of the Twelve visited daily. Two months after he recovered, President Ballard died and President Holland became the acting president of the Twelve.
“Well, this has been the most difficult year of my life, obviously — lose my wife, lose my health, be written off for dead,” he said. “That is a tender, tender subject for me. When my little family just refused to let me go, came to the hospital every day for four weeks and nothing was working, I was kept alive by faith. I was kept alive by blessings, by prayer.”
An international ministry
President Holland once noted that he was “a vigorous advocate of square shoulders and positive thinking!” — the exclamation point was in his written text — but did so in the context of counseling church members to be understanding of those who experience major depressive disorder. In that general conference talk, he shared his own experience with a terrifying bout of depression.
“At one point in our married life when financial fears collided with staggering fatigue, I took a psychic blow that was as unanticipated as it was real,” he said. “With the grace of God and the love of my family, I kept functioning and kept working, but even after all these years I continue to feel a deep sympathy for others more chronically or more deeply afflicted with such gloom than I was.”
He said church members should seek both heaven’s help and professional aid.
“If you had appendicitis, God would expect you to seek a priesthood blessing and get the best medical care available. So too with emotional disorders,” he said.
During his BYU presidency, the Hollands stood together in the first devotional assembly of each academic year to welcome new and returning students. In his international apostolic calling, they traveled the world together.
For example, from 2002-04, they lived with their family in Santiago, Chile, on a special assignment from then-church President Gordon B. Hinckley.
He made a historic, 16-day tour of Africa and dedicated Cameroon and Rwanda for the preaching of the gospel in August 2009. He was the first apostle to set foot in either nation. President Holland also traveled for two weeks overseas to two African countries — Angola and Burundi — in the fall of 2010 with Elder D. Todd Christofferson and dedicated them for the preaching of the gospel.
In 2018, the Hollands joined President Nelson and Sister Wendy Nelson on a global ministry tour, circumnavigating the globe.
“Their hope and their dream,” President Holland said of the Nelsons, “literally and figuratively, is to reach out to the world to show the internationalization of the church and the growth of the church. Our role is to sustain them in that.”
At the groundbreaking ceremony for the Red Cliffs Utah Temple in the Hollands’ beloved St. George, President Holland noted in his prayer that church members “face challenges of a modern kind for which temple attendance and worship experiences there are the sweet and soothing answer to our problems.”
Another, tearful statement he made about the Latter-day Saint belief in the power of priesthood and temples to create eternal families punctuated a video shown to countless visitors at dozens of public temple open houses.
“I don’t know how to speak about heaven in the traditional, lovely, paradisiacal beauty that we speak of heaven; I wouldn’t know how to speak of heaven, without my wife or my children,” President Holland said. “It would not be heaven for me.”
More than a year after Sister Holland’s death, he said he still awoke surprised each day she was not with him.
“The reason I think I am cheerful — I am not grieving as much as that immediate first chaos of loss, I am not grieving in that way as much — I am really quite happy,” he said, “but it is because I think I am just not very far away from being with her again.”
