The Universal Call to Holiness | Jim Graves | Catholic World Report | August 2011
Bishop Aquila on promoting a culture of life and sanctity
Bishop Samuel Aquila of Fargo, North Dakota, 61, was born and raised in Southern California. One of three children, he was the son of a physician, and the Catholic faith was important in his home. Aquila attended Catholic schools and learned the basics of his faith from the religious sisters who taught him the Baltimore Catechism. In high school, he was taught by the Carmelite Fathers.
Aquila’s Sicilian grandmother, who spoke only Italian, was an important model of piety for him growing up. She frequently stayed with his family, and Aquila recalls waking up early in the morning as a child and seeing his grandmother seated in her favorite chair, quietly praying and meditating.
He had an interest in the priesthood while he was in elementary school, but upon graduating from high school chose to pursue a career in medicine instead. He entered the University of Colorado as a pre-med student. However, in his third year of college, Aquila again began to think about the priesthood. He decided, “I really need to go test this out.”
Upon graduation, he entered St. Thomas Seminary in Denver, Colorado. After six months, “It became really clear to me that the Lord was calling me to the priesthood,” he said.
Aquila was ordained a priest in 1976, and served in a variety of positions in the Archdiocese of Denver before being named coadjutor bishop of Fargo, which is the eastern half of North Dakota. He was ordained a bishop in Fargo in 2001, and this year he celebrates the 10th anniversary of his arrival.
Fargo is home to 85,000 Catholics in 133 parishes. For a diocese of its size, Fargo does well for vocations, with 85 diocesan and 15 religious priests, and 17 seminarians. Bishop Aquila is known for his orthodoxy, piety and public defense of Church teaching on a variety of issues, especially the right to life. He recently spoke to CWR.
CWR: Why do you feel compelled to frequently speak out in opposition to abortion?
Bishop Aquila: My concern about the dignity of human life began when I was attending college in Colorado, one of the first states to liberalize its abortion laws. I was working as an orderly in a Boulder emergency room in the early 1970s, and a woman who had had an incomplete abortion was brought in. Those of us working in the emergency room were pro-life and had had nothing to do with the abortion, but were trying to help the woman afterward.
It was there I first saw the remains of an unborn child, about three and a half months along. It really impacted me. It was impressed in my mind and my heart and that this was a human life. It had now been forever destroyed. Ever since then I’ve been outspoken on human-life issues, and tried to help people to understand the dignity of human life.
As a priest and a bishop, I’ve spoken with women who have had abortions but later have a deep regret when they realize what they have done. There are tremendous lies out there in society, saying that the unborn child is not a unique human life, forever destroyed. The media has been deceptive about the issue, and many politicians have bought into idea that abortion is a right, which it isn’t. No one has the right to take innocent human life.
My commitment to the Church’s teachings on life issues has been reinforced by my study of theology, Blessed John Paul II’s encyclical Evangelium Vitae, and all that science can show us about the development of human beings. Each one of us started out helpless in the womb. From the moment of conception, we were living human beings. It is important to remind people of that truth.
Watching the process of abortion being legalized must have been distressing to you.
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