Steven Maekawa

Steven Maekawa leads one of the largest and most remote dioceses in the country, and he wears it lightly. What holds his attention is not how far it stretches but the people scattered across it. Asked what he most looked forward to as a bishop, he did not talk about the size of the job. He said he wanted to meet them, hear their stories, and learn the joys and challenges of their lives.

Prayerful, steady, and quietly tireless, he has carried those qualities through nearly three decades of priesthood, and it is why those who have worked with him tend to describe him not just by his office but by his faithfulness and his readiness to show up wherever he is needed. Long before anyone thought of him as a bishop, he spent years in Alaska and earned a reputation as a devout priest with a genuine love for the place and its people.

He came to the priesthood by way of the drafting table. A fourth-generation Japanese American, he grew up in the Seattle area in a Catholic home, and he was studying architecture at the University of Washington when he met the Dominican friars. Something about their life stayed with him. He joined the Order after graduating, professed his vows, and was ordained a priest in 1998. The years that followed carried him a long way. He served in parishes and at a university Newman Center, led vocations work for the Western Dominicans, and spent about a decade as a chaplain in the Navy Reserve, a role that once took him to Afghanistan. Then came Alaska. As pastor of Holy Family Old Cathedral in Anchorage, he began an outreach to the isolated Yupik and Inuit communities of the Alaskan bush, places cut off from the world by everything but an airfield or a boat landing, and long without a priest of their own. When one of those communities needed him, he was the first to go.

In 2023, Pope Francis named him bishop of Fairbanks, a diocese larger than most countries but home to fewer than twelve thousand Catholics, spread across dozens of parishes, many of them so far-flung they can only be reached by small plane and see a priest just a few times a year. He called the appointment as much a surprise as an honor. His motto, Duc in Altum, means "Put out into the Deep," the words Jesus once spoke to Peter, and they fit a man who has spent his life going out to the places hardest to reach. He has said he cannot think of a more exciting place to serve. For someone who once trained to design buildings, it is a fitting calling, and he is building still, just no longer with brick and stone.