Living Catholic with Father Don Wolf
Father Don Wolf, a priest of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City, offers a Catholic perspective on the issues confronting each person today.
Living Catholic with Father Don Wolf
A New Pope and Mother's Day | May 18, 2025
The unexpected election of the first American Pope has sent shockwaves through the Catholic world, leaving many wondering what this historic shift means for the Church's future. In this episode, Father Wolf cuts through the political noise to offer a thoughtful, nuanced perspective on Pope Leo XIV's election and what his leadership might bring.
Rather than falling into the trap of labeling the new pontiff as liberal or conservative, consider the whole person - his background, education and life experiences that will shape his papacy. Having spent years as a missionary in Peru, Pope Leo brings firsthand knowledge of Latin America's complex relationship with global superpowers and the realities of extreme poverty. His American cultural identity likely instills a problem-solving mentality and action-oriented approach to challenges. Additionally, his academic background in mathematics and canon law suggests a mind attuned to systematic thinking and ordered reasoning.
For Catholics in Oklahoma, Pope Leo's election brings renewed hope for Blessed Stanley Rother's canonization process. Given the Pope's missionary experience during times of political unrest in Latin America, he likely has a profound understanding of Father Rother's ministry and martyrdom. His choice of the papal name "Leo" - connecting to Leo XIII who authored groundbreaking Catholic social teaching - provides insight into his vision for navigating modern challenges while preserving essential Church teachings.
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Father Don Wolf is a priest of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City. Living Catholic also broadcasts on Oklahoma Catholic Radio several times per week, with new episodes airing every Sunday.
This is Living Catholic with Father Don Wolfe. This show deals with living the Catholic faith in our time, discovering God's presence in our lives and finding hope in His Word. And now your host, father Don Wolfe.
Speaker 2:Welcome Oklahoma to Living Catholic. I'm Father Don Wolfe, pastor of the Parish of Sacred Heart in Oklahoma City and rector of the Shrine of Blessed Stanley Rother. Of course it's impossible now not to make a few comments about the new pope, now that the selection has been made and all that has been done to establish his new pontificate. Certainly it is most extraordinary. No one I know ever imagined there'd be an American pope anytime soon. No one I know ever imagined there'd be an American pope anytime soon. And yet here we are. What this means in the imagination of the cardinals who elected him and what it will mean for the church at large will only become known by the passage of time. We do believe the Spirit does guide the church. Where we're being guided is yet to be seen. But first of all, it's as we begin to contemplate what this means for us.
Speaker 2:We live in a political age, so the first concern usually expressed about the Pope has to do with politics. Whether he's liberal or conservative, whether he presses all the hot buttons when it comes to the questions of the day or not, these seem to be the only questions well, at least the first ones that people have the depth of his belief and commitment to the life of faith, or the experience he brings as a pastor, his interaction with the lives and tears and laughter of the people he spent his life with. All these things seem to be of almost no interest to most of the commentators writing about the election. It's politics first which is too bad. The election it's politics first which is too bad, because there's bound to be more to him than simply filling in the boxes of the left-right scorecard the whole world keeps. The truth of the matter is that there's always more to everyone than those scorecards. Every person involved in public life is more than the sum of the positions and policies that he or she believes in. We like to make sure we can understand other people by attributing to them our understanding of the positions and policies that he or she believes in. We like to make sure we can understand other people by attributing to them our understanding of the world, so we put them on one team or another or on one side of the question or the other. This will happen throughout the entire pontificate of Pope Leo, beginning now. But the Pope is first of all a person, not a political party. He'll be working through the many people who make up the administration of the church, and his decisions will be shaped by the needs and circumstances of the time, not simply what his agenda might be. Pope Leo is the leader of the Church of Jesus Christ, a believer in the sovereignty of God and the working of the Holy Spirit in time and space, not a news channel commentator or a party boss.
Speaker 2:The second thing is that he spent a good part of his life in Latin America, most specifically in Peru. That's significant because Latin America has its specific history when it comes to its encounter with the modern world. The Spanish presence in South America marked its history and its development in profound ways, especially in contrast to North America and the English presence there. For generations, peru has been defined by great poverty and a profound sense of being left behind in the contest with the world at large. And when you're left behind, you don't often take kindly to the swirl of history happening around you. In my experience, peruvians are often puzzled and dazed by the buzz of life. Plus, latin America has been a place in which the superpowers have played their games for a long time.
Speaker 2:As a product of our politics and concerns, we Americans have found very little compunction, running roughshod over the people and priorities of the many countries there in South America, as the Secretary of State said to President Theodore Roosevelt in the early 20th century. After Roosevelt bragged to him about prompting the revolution in Panama, causing it to secede from Colombia and then recognizing the new country immediately so as to sign a deal to build the Panama Canal, the Secretary of State said Mr President, let not so noble an achievement be touched by even the hint of legality Because of this presumption about our motives and interests. We're comfortable using words like democracy and due process and freedom in ways we understand, but those same words when used by us in the presence of peoples whose experience of American priorities is not the same as our experience of them, the words don't sound the same. But he is an American, not a Peruvian, which means he thinks and reacts as an American. Only time will tell concerning what that will mean as it touches on the governance of the whole church. Again, the Pope's experience has been wide and deep. What that translates into when addressing the needs and concerns of the gospel will depend on the circumstances and the occasion. Frustratingly, we'll have to wait and see how his papacy develops.
Speaker 2:Americans are a can-do people after all. Generally we're problem solvers and are action-oriented. We like to get at problems as they come to us. We like to sort them out and find solutions. At problems as they come to us, we like to sort them out and find solutions. Normally, we don't like to have concerns ripen and mature, hoping they'll get better on their own. Our first concern is to tackle them and straighten them out as best we can immediately. Most of all, we like it when things are running the right way and everything's functioning as it ought. When it's not working correctly, we want to work to change it.
Speaker 2:Whether this describes the new pope or not is not as important as knowing that this is the environment of his thinking, whether he embodies these values. These are the ones that shaped him. It's important for us to know that they live in him, as they live in all of us, and he brings this to the work of the church. Personally, I also think that his premier areas of study mathematics and canon law matter to our understanding of him. These disciplines seem remote to each other. After all, getting a college degree in math is a lot different than addressing the pressing questions of justice and due process that a lawyer faces when studying the law of the church, but both disciplines are marked by great attention to the process of thinking and deduction. Most of all, they are studies of the systems by which we come to understand what's possible concerning what we can know and can do. Most of the time, we don't have many glances at the interior functioning of the mind of the Pope. These disciplines and what they have in common are hints of what Pope Leo finds interesting and helpful. They no doubt are markers of how he sees the world. It's also a fact that we're much heartened by his history and his interests.
Speaker 2:When it comes to the issue of Father Rother's possible canonization, we're in the process of collecting testimony and evidence necessary to complete the guidelines for canonization. As Archbishop Coakley has mentioned, we need only one miracle, just as Stanley Rother needs only one miracle for canonization, but having the Pope's interest is all in our favor. Pope Leo spent many years in Latin America as a missionary, serving in Peru during the time of the insurgency there and the government's response to it. More than most people, he would understand the pressures and the challenges of Stan's ministry, as well as its power to witness to the pressures and the challenges of Stan's ministry, as well as its power to witness to the truth of the gospel. While no one expects him simply to walk into his office and direct everyone to complete the process, his presence there keeps us animated. My prayer is that there are some of us who knew Blessed Stanley personally still around when the canonization takes place. That prayer seems closer to being answered with his election, and choosing the name Leo is also an interesting hint.
Speaker 2:Leo XIII was the pope who ushered the church in Europe into the contemporary age of economics and social understanding. His most famous papal encyclical, rerum Novarum, which is Latin for On New Things, was the beginning of the church's social teaching, touching on the concerns of modern nations and the international order. As in the administration of every pope, leo XIII was struggling to understand what to do in the face of the changing conditions of the economies and livelihoods of the people all through the church. There was no game plan to consult, no crystal ball to look into. He had to figure out how to navigate the changing conditions of his place in time while remaining faithful to what was good and holy in what remained, holy in what remained.
Speaker 2:That our new pope wants to follow in this pathway, explicitly and directly, by taking this namesake, is a window onto his vision of the future, and he's young as far as popes go. He's not quite 70 years old In our day and time. That means he's due to live about 15 more years. Of course, no one can predict the closing gates of mortality for anyone else. He may surpass this median or, conversely, not live up to it, but in the normal course of things he's going to be our pope for a long time. We'll have the chance to see his priorities and understand his concerns and listen to his preaching.
Speaker 2:Hearing all of this in English might be something different for us, but we'll certainly hear a lot. Popes tend to ripen in their old age. No doubt we'll get to see this too. No matter what your experience has been before you come into the office, you no doubt come to see it all differently once you've occupied it for a while. My guess is that the latter part of his pontificate won't be the same as the initial part of it.
Speaker 2:And finally, not everybody's going to like him. That's one of the elements of the political life in which we live. He will be dogged by notoriety and commentary wherever he goes and whatever he does. My guess is that he'll be disliked and criticized by about half of US Catholics. Whatever his decisions are about, whatever issue comes before him, there'll be those who are upset with what he does or what he fails to do. We shouldn't worry too much, because it comes with the job. No one is exempt from the criticisms of others, especially someone who assumes the leadership of the universal church. St Peter was not exempt from the corrections and critiques of others as he led the church. There's no reason to think his successor in this office will be. It's important we not be misled or assume the worst when we begin to hear the doom and gloom that will inevitably pour forth from the organs of analyses that so much defines our world.
Speaker 2:Unfortunately, with all of the excitement about the new pope, the celebration of Mother's Day pretty much got lost. While we often make a big deal about this part of our civil calendar, it was subsumed in all of the reporting about the current pontiff, especially because he's an American. While we're all waiting to see what this portends for the church universal, we should return for a moment to the celebration of Mother's Day and honor the woman that provided us all with the gift of life, and I have to say I'm not usually the best person to write about this. My mother died when I was 16. I loved my mother as much as anyone, but it was a difficult time to lose her. That is, I was old enough and our lives were complicated enough that she wasn't my mommy. But I wasn't mature enough or enough along in life to know her and to respect her as an adult, from an adult perspective. And that was all the more complicated by two other factors. The first was that she had been ill for a long time before she died. So for the previous five years we'd all been haunted by the specter of her growing weaker and more threatened by her condition. So whatever else was happening in my life as I went through the beginning of my teenage years, it was overshadowed by what was going on in her life. And the second was that we lived as a large family in a small house.
Speaker 2:In all of the interactions I had with her in the whole course of my life, I remember having only two conversations with her that were private, one-on-one. Now, that sounds odd to say and many people interpret it to mean that we didn't talk, which wasn't true. We talked all the time and interacted about everything. The last thing in our lives was that everyone was silent. It's just that our conversations took place among the whole family as part of the common life that we lived. There were no private moments, no solitary conversations between us.
Speaker 2:Besides those two times I mentioned, I never had the chance to develop the kind of intimacy with her that might be more normal between a mother and a son these days. It just didn't happen that way. As I look back on all those circumstances, I most regret that I never had the chance to have a conversation with her adult to adult. Things may have been different between her and me. So, all this being said, I don't automatically have warm, fuzzy feelings when it comes to my mother. I know there's a common trope about priests that they talk about their mother with the warmest and the most tender notions, setting her apart as the font and origin of everything soft and cuddly in their lives. It's not that way with me. I loved my mother, but it was complicated. Of course it was. But there's another part of my relationship with her that has become important to me, and actually it started several years ago, because several years ago our home parish Immaculate Conception was closed.
Speaker 2:As part of the closure, the parish cemetery was transferred to the care of the nearest parish, which was St James, and my friend Father Pruitt was the pastor there at the time and he put in place the necessary procedures for the transfer of the care of the cemetery and as part of the process he met with the cemetery board. Now almost everybody on the cemetery board is a cousin of mine. This isn't quite as inbred as it sounds, because just about everybody in the cemetery is a cousin of mine as well. It's only natural that those of us who have so much of our family lying there should also be a part of the upkeep and care of the cemetery. The import of this fact is that when the board meets they all know one another. In fact they've all grown up together with one another.
Speaker 2:So Father Pruitt said after the first meeting that they had all commented about growing up with me and with my family. He also said that in their conversation they all described my mother as, in his words, basically a saint. Now I had to laugh when I heard his comments. He never met her, he didn't know her at all, and my cousins, who did know her, didn't know her as I did. Certainly she was a good person with much goodness in her life, but I never thought of her as a saint, and after all, that's the kind of thing people say when they want to be nice. They all knew he was a friend of mine. They wanted to be nice to him by being complimentary of me, so they said nice things about my mother. It's all understandable and straightforward.
Speaker 2:I don't think the Vatican will begin any investigations into possible beatification anytime soon. So I told him right away she wasn't a saint. But I thought about it for a while. Why was I so quick to dismiss their thoughts? After all, they had the chance to see something of her I couldn't have seen. Their perspectives were, by definition, different than my own. Certainly there was a possibility. They knew what I didn't know. But there was also something more to it than that. I wasn't reacting, at least not at first, to their claims about how extraordinary they thought she was. I'm glad they thought of her as holy. No, I was responding to the weight of her example.
Speaker 2:What would I do if, in fact, she was a saint? What if there was some determination that she had lived her life in the glow of the deepest faith and the most solemn concern to know God's will and to do it? If that was the case, then my life would bear some measure of the impact of her life. I'd be measuring my own life by the greatness of hers, which is a test I can't pass. I denied their observation first of all because I couldn't bear that it might be right.
Speaker 2:What if my mother was a saint? That would mean that I had received the nurture and support I needed to open my eyes and my heart to the love of God, and I had received it from the earliest time. Rather than simply groping for answers and struggling to find meaning, I had been directed by the caring example of someone who strove to share every good thing with me from the beginning. If God was at work in her life in ways that caused her example to glow in the life of everyone she was around, then, through extension, god was at work in my life to guide and to direct. And if all this were true, then I was blessed in just about every way. From the beginning. I wouldn't be able to hide behind the normal confusions and limitations that we all know so well, or at least I wouldn't be able to cast my environment and its deficiencies as the enemy of clarity and purpose in my life. If she were a saint, I would have received just about every benefit and grace any person could receive. She wouldn't be perfect. Saints are not avatars of perfection. They're the examples of forgiveness and forbearance, but by being so, they are bearers of grace and goodness into the world.
Speaker 2:My mother, if she were a saint, would have been the means by which extraordinary graces entered into my life, all of which changes our yardsticks by which I measure myself. I'd have to look at the sum of what I've done and realize I started out with every advantage a person could have. As K Bailey Hutchinson said of George W Bush, he started out on third base and thought he'd hit a triple. Now there's no shame in beginning with advantages and parlaying them throughout life. Everyone ought to. But life looks different when we realize we're beginning way ahead. Life looks different when we realize we're beginning way ahead If we're on the relay team and receive the baton from our teammate who's already one lap ahead of everybody else in the race. Making it across the finish line is a different kind of achievement than if the contest was determined by half a step.
Speaker 2:When I look at my life, it's intimidating to imagine I may have received so much what I've done and what the content of my life is is meager. If I'm measuring with those kinds of metrics, everything I'm proud of and every accomplishment I've focused on looks different. They look smaller. If I affirm the sanctity of this person who filled my life with such grace and goodness she set the stage for everything it makes my entrance upon it a lot less spectacular. But those are just speculations.
Speaker 2:As I said, I knew my mother in ways no one else did. I observed her faults and her limitations, her prejudices and wrongheadedness up close. She was gracious and pious. She could also be sharp and harsh. She was a product of the limitations of her time and place, some of which she did not overcome. Saints are not perfect, and her imperfections do not describe her any more than mine describe me. I'm not actually imagining her to be qualified for the designation of extraordinary holiness. I'll be safe when, at the last judgment, I'm waiting to see exactly what the content of my life was, when the hidden and the obscure finally become evident to me.
Speaker 2:My mother won't secretly be Mother Teresa, but the real point is that our mothers give us the gift of themselves in ways that almost always remain hidden and obscure. Whatever the whole content of their lives are. They share them with their children and shape and form our lives in all we do. Most of the great skills we'll learn from walking and talking to going to the bathroom and knowing how to eat come from our interactions with our mothers. She stands first as the person who made us, and we have almost no recollection of all that was given to us through her, at least not in some. Her contributions are almost always invisible and usually undetectable. We can start out on third base and never, ever notice, because our mother put us there, which is what we should celebrate on Mother's Day, or what we should have celebrated.
Speaker 2:It's a small part of the larger reality, which is that our true challenge is to be responsive to God at work in our lives, in every way that work shows itself. We're tempted to look around and measure ourselves by what we're doing compared to everyone else, to measure where we are by looking at where all our contemporaries are. In truth, though, the measure is whether we're faithful to the work we've been given, not whether we've lapped someone on the racetrack of life or bested the one next to us by a step or two, since so much of what we are has been poured into us by the invisible hands of circumstances and grace. We're invited to keep our eyes focused on God's will rather than looking around at what's happening to us. So happy belated Mother's Day and happy Pope's Day. I don't think we really have a day to celebrate who the Pope is and what his leadership will think. We really have a day to celebrate who the Pope is and what his leadership will mean to us, but, come to think of it, his presence and leadership will mostly be invisible as well. The invitation to faithfulness remains the same for all of us. We have to keep our eyes fixed on God and God's work in life, not simply on the swirl of events and words that seethe around us. It's not who's been a saint for us or who will be, but whether we'll be one or not after all. Back in just a moment.
Speaker 2:Welcome back to our final segment, faith in Verse, with a poem today called I Searched. I searched for God upon waking, as I found my world and me at odds. The morning news was urgent and breaking, as I implored the help of my God To find meaning in suffering and tears, to know the ultimate purpose of all, rather than to suffocate amid fears or be bloodied in my regular falls, and heard not silence back, but an intense voice urging me not to focus on the void and its lack, nor the limitations of all I could not see, to listen and pay attention instead to the working of God active. Now the divine has not faltered, as is said, nor disappeared behind nature's aloud, is present to us there, looming in sight, quick to respond to the merest inquiry, preserving the divine gift of light as we wait for God's voice.
Speaker 2:Endearing, that's I Searched. One of the great things about a new pope is that we have the opportunity to pause for just a moment and look at his presence in the great succession of all of those who have come before him, just as we have the chance to look at all that has formed us. I hope that in the weeks to come, that by Living Catholic we can drill down into some of those truths more deeply. Hope you can join us then.
Speaker 1:Living Catholic is a production of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City for Oklahoma Catholic Radio. To learn more, visit okcrorg.