Apostle Jeffrey R. Holland is in the hospital, undergoing diagnostic tests for an unknown illness, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced Wednesday.
The 79-year-old leader, a popular speaker and former Brigham Young University president, was “admitted to the hospital last week following several days of illness,” spokesman Eric Hawkins said in a news release. “He has been tested and does not have COVID-19. Other diagnostic studies are being done.”
No other information was released about Holland’s condition.
In a video posted last week by the Elijah Interfaith Institute in Jerusalem, Holland spoke of his self-reflection due to the pandemic’s isolation.
“How unusual it is for some of us, including me, to be self-quarantined … spending time with myself that I don’t often have the opportunity to do,” Holland told Rabbi Alon Goshen-Gottstein. “Some things I like about Jeff Holland … but some other things need work, need improvement.”
He has “suddenly become very, very anxious about the well-being of other people,” the apostle said in the videotaped interview. “In this moment, I’m concerned about specific people — my 90-year-old neighbor, my 95-year-old prophet and president of the church. That’s personalized it more than I have been conscious of doing in the past. … They are real people with real faces. … I see them for who they are, as children of God. I always did, but now with a threat in the air we can’t even see … it’s made it more personal. I am a little more fixed on them than I am in normal times.”
In his most recent sermon, during April’s General Conference, to Latter-day Saints across the globe, Holland addressed his hopes for a better world emerging after the pandemic.
“We pray for those who have lost loved ones to this modern plague, as well as for those currently infected,” he said. “When we have conquered it — and we will — may we be equally committed to freeing the world from the virus of hunger and freeing neighborhoods and nations from the virus of poverty. May we hope for schools where students are taught — not terrified they will be shot — and for the gift of personal dignity for every child of God, unmarred by any form of racial, ethnic or religious prejudice.”
This story will be updated.
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