In discerning his vocation, Bishop-elect Anthony B. Taylor said he considered becoming a social worker.
After his second year of college, he realized he could combine his interest in serving people with his “devout” Catholic upbringing and love of the Church and become a priest.
“Being Christian means doing something here and building the kingdom of God here,” he told Arkansas Catholic. “The Lord was showing me the priesthood is where that could occur … It hit me that a lot of the people I might deal with as a social worker are probably poorer spiritually than they are materially.”
He credits the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. with his decision to follow the calling. He was in eighth grade when Rev. King was assassinated 40 years ago in Memphis.
“On the day of his death God gave me an insight that helped me eventually hear his call to the priesthood,” he said, reading from his prepared statement at the April 10 press conference. “The insight was this: Being a faithful Christian requires more than just saying prayers, obeying the Commandments and trying to get your own soul into heaven. If you’re only interested in your own spiritual welfare in the next life, you don’t really believe in the redemptive power of the cross of Jesus Christ.
“Martin Luther King taught me that being a faithful Christian required that I do whatever I could to help build the Kingdom of God here and now, and that to do so would require courage not timidity, fear of God not fear of man. If you don’t align yourself with the Kingdom of God in this life, how do you expect to be admitted into the Kingdom of God in the next?”
Father Taylor was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1954 and moved to Ponca City, Okla., when he was 6 years old. He graduated from Ponca City High School in 1972.
Basil and Rachel Taylor welcomed five boys and two girls in nine years. Bishop-elect Taylor is the oldest of the children and admits they continue to remain close today. His parents and two siblings still live in Ponca City while the remaining siblings live in the Fort Worth/Dallas area.
“Faith was a given, but it was also discussed,” he said of his family. “We talked about our faith and we lived it.”
After attending the University of Oklahoma for two years, he was accepted as a seminarian for the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City. He earned a degree in history from St. Meinrad Seminary in Indiana and was chosen to attend the North American College in Rome in 1976.
While some men questioned their decisions to become seminarians, Bishop-elect Taylor said he was always sure.
“It was a very good fit,” he said. “I never had any second thoughts.”
He was ordained by then-Archbishop Charles A. Salatka in Ponca City in 1980. From 1984 to 1989 he attended Fordham University in New York and earned a doctorate in biblical theology. When he returned to Oklahoma City, he was named vicar for ministries, a position he held until his appointment in Little Rock.
During his first four years of ministry in the 1980s, he worked as an associate pastor in two parishes. One month after his ordination he started offering Mass in Spanish twice a month in Clinton and Hinton, Okla.
Father Taylor decided he wanted to also minister in Spanish because he wanted to be able to reach more Catholics in the pews.
“The Church needs to reach out and welcome everybody,” he said.
He studied Spanish while in high school and college, but he perfected it while ministering to his parishioners.
“I learned all of my Spanish in Oklahoma,” he said.
Spanish is second nature to the new bishop. He said he read novels in Spanish during his leisure time and prays the Liturgy of the Hours every day in Spanish.
While he has spent many years working with Hispanics, he said, “My ministry is to everybody.”
In 1993, he was the founding pastor of St. Monica Church in Edmond, Okla., which is known as a “total stewardship parish.” Since 2003 he has served at Sacred Heart Church in Oklahoma City, a parish of 1,200 families, 95 percent of whom speak Spanish. The parish currently has nine weekend Masses, with seven of them celebrated in Spanish.
Bishop-elect Taylor has been a vocal opponent of Oklahoma’s new immigration law, which took effect Nov. 1. The law makes it a felony to knowingly harbor or transport undocumented people and creates barriers to hiring them. Bishop-elect Taylor, along with Archbishop Beltran, priests and more than 1,000 laypeople, signed a one-page “pledge of resistance” to the law.
“It is a sin to obey an unjust law,” he said in October. “That applies to anybody.”
Bishop-elect Taylor has served in various archdiocesan positions, including vicar for ministries, minister to priests, director of the permanent diaconate program, chairman of the Presbyteral Council, Clergy Personnel Board and Clergy Retirement Board, and as a member of the Archdiocesan Finance Council. He is also a member of the board of trustees for Mount Saint Mary High School in Oklahoma City, a sister school to Mount Saint Mary Academy in Little Rock.
Bishop-elect Taylor is also involved in promoting the sainthood cause for an Oklahoma City priest who was martyred in 1981. The archdiocese sponsored a parish in Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala, from 1963 to 2001. Father Stanley Rother was assigned there from 1968 until his death.
Since 2005 Bishop-elect Taylor has directed the archdiocese’s assistance to the parish, a local hospital and a planned alcohol abuse treatment center. In September 2007 the cause of canonization for Father Rother was formally opened and Bishop-elect Taylor was named the episcopal delegate for the process.
