Steven Maekawa
Steven John Maekawa was born on November 22, 1967, in Seattle, Washington, a fourth-generation Japanese American; his mother, a convert to Catholicism, raised her four children in the faith. He met the Dominican friars while studying architecture at the University of Washington, and entered the Order after graduating in 1990, professed first vows on September 14, 1991, and took a Master of Divinity at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in Berkeley. He was ordained a priest on May 29, 1998, in Oakland.
He served as parochial vicar at St. Dominic's in San Francisco, director of the Newman Center at the University of Washington, prior of the San Francisco novitiate, and vocations director for the Western Province. Alongside this he served a decade as a U.S. Navy Reserve chaplain, deploying to Afghanistan in 2004 with the Army's 25th Infantry Division. In 2016 his province sent him north as pastor of Holy Family Old Cathedral in Anchorage, where he launched an outreach carrying friars to Native communities with no resident priest.
Pope Francis named him the seventh Bishop of Fairbanks on July 11, 2023, and he was ordained and installed on October 12, 2023, taking the motto Duc in altum, put out into the deep. He governs the largest diocese in the United States, some 409,000 square miles of northern Alaska with 46 parishes and missions, most reachable only by bush plane, and about 12,000 Catholics, many of them Alaska Native.
- 2024The cathedral Latin Mass ran on through his first full year on the published schedules: 6:00 PM at Sacred Heart Cathedral on paired Saturdays - 11 and 25 May, 1 and 29 June, 10 and 24 August, 14 and 21 September, 12 and 26 October, 9 and 23 November, 14 and 28 December 2024. ↗
- 2025-03The Sacred Heart Cathedral bulletin of 9 March 2025 lists an 'Extraordinary Form Latin Mass (TLM)' at the cathedral on 8 and 22 March 2025, in the same Saturday 6:00 PM slot. ↗
- 2026By June 2026 the diocesan calendar lists the Traditional Latin Mass at Immaculate Conception Church in Fairbanks - a parish church staffed by priests of the Institute of the Incarnate Word - still on Saturdays at 6:00 PM (6 and 27 June, 1 and 29 August, 5 September and 10 October 2026). When the move from the cathedral was made, and by what instrument, has not been published; no decree or announcement has been found. ↗
Fairbanks is not a diocese where the old Mass had to be planted after Traditionis Custodes; it was already there. A Traditional Latin Mass at Sacred Heart Cathedral, on Saturday evenings about twice a month, stood on a schedule printed in the spring of 2021, before the motu proprio appeared, and it simply never stopped. It ran under Bishop Zielinski, through the year-long vacancy under Archbishop Bellisario, and into Bishop Maekawa's tenure: same city, same Saturday hour, same modest rhythm.
Of Bishop Maekawa himself, on this question, there is almost nothing to report, and the dossier says so plainly rather than dress silence up as policy. No decree, statement or interview answer of his on the old Mass has been found. What can be said is what did not happen, and what did: the Mass was not ended, not cut back and not exiled. In 2026 it appears on his chancery's own calendar at Immaculate Conception Church in Fairbanks, still on Saturday evenings. A bishop who wished the old Mass gone, in a diocese with a single site and a severe shortage of priests, would not have had to work hard to end it. It is still there.
That is preservation in fact, whoever deserves the credit on paper: the predecessors who left it standing, the cathedral and parish clergy who kept offering it, or the bishop who let it be. Judged by acts rather than words, the only act visible in his tenure is continuance. If he holds views on the old Mass, he has not put them in the public record, and the faithful of Fairbanks still have their Saturday Latin Mass.