Father Bill Atkinson, O.S.A.

The Priest Who Never Had a Bad Day

William Atkinson was born in 1946 in Philadelphia to a devout Catholic family. As a young man, he entered the Augustinian novitiate, drawn to the order’s tradition of community and scholarship. Everything changed on February 22, 1965, when a toboggan accident severed his spinal cord. He was nineteen years old. Doctors said he should have died on impact. Instead, he was paralyzed from the neck down for the rest of his life.

Most men would have abandoned the dream of priesthood. Atkinson did not. He continued his seminary studies from a wheelchair, and after years of perseverance, Pope Paul VI granted a special dispensation allowing him to be ordained despite his quadriplegia. On February 2, 1974, he became the first quadriplegic man ordained a Catholic priest.

Father Bill began teaching theology at Monsignor Bonner High School in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, that same year. For the next thirty years, he showed up every day. He celebrated Mass, heard confessions, counseled students, and taught theology from his wheelchair. He needed assistance for nearly every physical task, yet his spirit was unbreakable. His constant refrain to anyone who asked how he was doing: “I never had a bad day.”

Thousands of students passed through his classroom at Bonner, and his witness to joy in suffering transformed lives. He died in 2006, and in 2017 Archbishop Charles Chaput opened his cause for canonization. The diocesan phase was completed in 2021, with documentation sent to Rome. Father Bill Atkinson lived forty-one years as a quadriplegic and never once complained. His life is a testimony that holiness is not about what you can do, but about who you choose to be.

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