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
Remembering Those We Proudly Hail | May 25, 2025
In this episode, we explore the forgotten meaning of Memorial Day and our collective responsibility to honor those who made the ultimate sacrifice. What began as "Decoration Day" to honor Civil War dead has transformed into something far less meaningful for many Americans today.
• Memorial Day originally honored those who died in the Civil War—America's deadliest conflict
• Human societies throughout history have created monuments to honor their fallen warriors
• We possess a remarkable capacity to forget even the most profound events
• The Oklahoma City bombing example shows how quickly even life-changing events fade from memory
• War veterans often find more in common with former enemies than with civilians
• Memorial Day evolved to honor fallen soldiers from both Union and Confederate sides
• As Catholics, we believe the dead remain part of our fellowship in Christ
• The faithful practice of remembrance connects us to those who sacrificed for our freedom
This Memorial Day, let us pause to remember those who gave their lives and find a place for them in our hearts and prayers.
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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 Father Don Wolfe, pastor of Sacred Heart Parish in Oklahoma City and rector of the Shrine of Blessed Stanley Rother. As we approach Memorial Day, it's good to give pause and give a nod to its original intent. Admittedly, we've grown somewhat slack in acknowledging its primary focus and have instead allowed it to become a shadow of its former and quite noble intent. Now it's mostly a celebration of the first day of summer and that's about all. And that's too bad, since it was originally an important element in the definition, and then the redefinition, of American life. To replace it with a holiday to begin the vacation season is to make it much less than it used to be, which is too bad for us.
Speaker 2:Memorial Day was first intended to be the chance to honor those who had been killed in the most destructive and deadly American war ever fought the Civil War. This conflict continues to have that distinction up to today, thank God. Even though American soldiers have gone to fight on almost every continent in a bewildering number of wars and police actions, the total of these conflicts has never even begun to approach the startling number of Civil War dead. In fact, the total US dead in all of the other wars hardly add up to the casualties enacted on the battlefields scattered throughout the arc of the border states of the Confederacy where the most bloody of the actions of the war between the states were fought. Memorial Day was enacted in order to recognize those who had been killed and to honor their sacrifice. It's a long and complicated history. The desire to honor the dead that springs up from the heart of human society. Most every society we have in all the ages of human civilization, have a version of honoring those who have been killed in battle. In fact, some of the oldest monuments of past societies that we have available to us, whose other constructions have otherwise now turned to dust, are their memorials to the fallen. In many cases, we don't know about their cities or libraries, or their irrigation or agriculture as much as we know about the battles they won and lost. Their war monuments are what remain of them. This is because they invested them with their energy and skill just so that they would honor and what they honored would be remembered and celebrated.
Speaker 2:But not only in stone and mortar. Some of the oldest memorials of those who have died are inscribed in the stories that come to us from previous generations. Indeed, one of the cornerstones of the literature of the Western world is the Iliad, a story of the generation-long conflict between the men of Troy and the soldiers of the Achaeans who cast up on the shores of Illyricum to do battle. The heroes of that epic are more well known to us than the governors, kings, mathematicians and priests of the time. We know more about the armor and swords carried by the armies of the Greeks and the Trojans than we know of the cradles that hung in their houses and the food at their table. All because of this gigantic monument of literary accomplishment that has helped to define the canon of the West. We may honor the contributions of the Greek mind and its place in our civilization, but we remember the place of arms and the tribute to the fallen more than anyone else. It would seem.
Speaker 2:This element of human society thrusts itself upon us. Certainly after the Civil War, when the almost unimaginable suffering of all of society was present in virtually every household, this energy rose up in the collective heart of the whole country. It was not possible that so much suffering could go unregarded and unmemorialized. Everyone felt that such sacrifice could not be left to be misunderstood or forgotten. Everyone in the country had to be apprised of what had happened and what it had meant for the whole people, and thus honoring the fallen by honoring their graves became a national cause.
Speaker 2:The bitter truth is that we are capable of forgetting to a degree that it's frightening. This is true of individuals, but it's even more the case in reference to collective memory. Our capacity to adapt and to make do is so comprehensive. We can become accustomed to almost any situation such that we can forget what preceded it In a few years. As the world rushes by in a cataract of events and issues, we can have a hard time recalling what really happened active events and issues. We can have a hard time recalling what really happened and in this inevitable lapse, we can forget what's important and what really counts as needful and necessary. Without being reminded, without placing a block in our path to cause us to pause, we're liable to go on as if nothing much had happened at all.
Speaker 2:In 1995, in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, everyone in Oklahoma remained closely aware of all that had taken place following the events of April 19th, both the horror of realizing that political violence could touch us here in the heartland, as well as the stirring aftermath when we came together as a people to achieve such amazing results caused us to brag that we would never forget, and we really meant it. We thought it would be impossible for us to forget such remarkable and powerful events. Who could forget where they were and what they were doing in Oklahoma City when the bomb went off? Who couldn't tell you when they saw the smoke rising from downtown and what they first thought it was, and who didn't know what their first response was when the cries for help came, whether from the site itself or from the radio and TV coverage? And those elements of that day were burned into our memories. We hardly had to mention them to others, or even to ourselves, because they occupied such prominent parts of our lives. Plus, our little stories were as nothing compared to the great, imposing stories of the real heroes and noble works that came out of those days. In fact, most of us never even thought about recording what we did or didn't do or what our participation in this monumental event was, since it was only a tiny pebble in a great foundation and because everyone else had their own stories and their own memories of all of us that we remembered together.
Speaker 2:Yet, as the decades have gone by, what we remember and its importance have also passed by. We have a hard time recalling exactly the details of our place and what happened. Sure, we can tell what we remember, but we have a hard time putting the edge on it. The immediacy of it is dulled by the passage of the years. Even if we're good at storytelling and can elicit some of the original drama of what took place, even if we can cause the blood to stir in the veins of someone who was not yet born when these events took place, we'd still have a hard time conveying what it was like to be struck with the surprise and the shock of the day. Today, it's a fact that terrorism and a threat are a reality even here, but at that time it was unimaginable.
Speaker 2:We can tell the facts and yet not be able to communicate the truth of it all. It's so easy to forget, it's so normal to let the small details go, it's so natural to focus on something else that what lay at the heart of our lives when all these things took place has become but a wisp After a while. It really is forgotten. Perhaps worse for us, it is so thoroughly forgotten that it is remembered only as pictures and video. That's the particular trouble we have in our age.
Speaker 2:We can show a young person the reports that we still have recorded and we can allow them to experience the succession of events as they took place. But they can't know what we know. They can experience it as we did. The most astute of them can really enter into the historical record and feel the uncomprehending struggle everyone had as they strove to adjust to the truth of this event. But when they turn off the videos and turn away from the TV screens, what they remember is not the event but what they saw of it. Their memory is of the reports, not the event itself.
Speaker 2:Even we can fall into the trap of remembering more of what we saw on TV than what we knew of the event itself. The heart of what happened becomes stripped of its flesh and becomes an exercise in thought and impression rather than a foundation of experience and conviction. We forget easily, and not only easily, we forget comprehensively. There's also another element to take into consideration immediacy. So many things happen and so much is a part of our everyday. We have difficulty keeping our memories and the sum of our experiences clear. No matter how powerful or notable the moment was, it can easily be drowned out in the flood of other moments so that it becomes but a drop in a sea stretching from horizon to horizon.
Speaker 2:I remember the first Gulf War, for example, and the lead-up to the beginning of hostilities. We watched the TV reports of the build-up of forces and the series of deadlines set by the UN that would result in the opening of hostilities against the Iraqi forces in Kuwait. And as the year 1991 began, the eyes of the whole world were turned to the desert and to the deployment of the allied forces there, wondering if and when a war would start. In January of that year I was in Orlando, florida, for a meeting of the National Board of the National Federation of Priest Councils. After a long day of meetings, the whole board went to a local Italian restaurant for supper and as we entered, the maitre d' who seemed to be a man of vaguely Middle Eastern European features, said in a heavily accented voice they're bombing Baghdad. It was a moment of real gravity. I remember thinking that moment would remain burned in my memory, since there was no place more exotic or more distant in imagination than Baghdad. And yet there we were.
Speaker 2:The US Air Force was flying over the skies of Baghdad, opening the Great War in the Middle East against Iraq. It was monumental, after all. I still do remember it. But the force, the leverage of that memory has dulled. Our armed involvement in Baghdad has now become a trope. We have a 35-year history of military engagement there. Hearing a news report of fighting in Iraq involving US forces would elicit hardly a ho-hum shrug of the shoulders, not a moment of jarring imaginative gasps. That first moment was succeeded by a cascade of other moments, so that it's hard to remember its importance and it's almost impossible to remember its impact. Bombing in Baghdad is about as notable as building a fence. It's one of those things that happen all the time. After a while we just get used to it. We slough it off as nothing. We have the power to forget and to adjust so that almost anything can become routine. So we have to work at remembering.
Speaker 2:Our ancestors faced the same challenge. They'd just come through the ghastliest war anyone could imagine, with hundreds of thousands killed from all over the Union, with even more men wounded and scarred. The war was as close as any town square where the men gathered to talk about their experiences and to brandish their canes. But even then, the full tilt of the war, the price paid by those who had, even then, the full tilt of the war. The price paid by those who had been killed and the suffering of the living was being eclipsed. The people began to forget almost as quickly as the war was over, and not only forget, but to recast the war experience. It became almost impossible to keep in mind both the suffering of those who had undergone the horrors of the war as well as the indefiniteness of what they had undergone.
Speaker 2:When a limping veteran talked about the Battle of Gettysburg or the Siege of Corinth, the hearer could understand his words in terms of the great victory that was won by the Union there. All the death and destruction they described was contexted by the assurance that the Confederacy was defeated and the Union preserved and slavery abolished. But the experience of the war was nothing like this. The soldier facing the death of his comrades had no idea who was winning or who was losing. As the bullets tore into the flesh around him, there was no guarantee he was formed up on the winning side or that that afternoon of suffering would be the linchpin of the victory to be won. All he knew was the noise and fear and blood of his immediate experience. Even in remembering the memories failed.
Speaker 2:Ernie Pyle, the famous World War II correspondent, captured this so well in his description of the invasion of Sicily. He'd caught a ride on a Navy ship as it crossed from Tunisia to the coast of Sicily as part of the movement to the beaches there. Standing with a group of naval officers as they watched the nearby warships shell the shore and then the smoke and dust of the battle, one of the officers said I wish I was in New York so I'd know what was going on here. Being there was not a gateway to seeing and knowing everything, but a hindrance to it. Later in life, once he'd read all of the accounts and all of the histories of the invasion, he could say that he had been there for that part of the war, and those who heard him could acknowledge that he had been there for that part of the war. And those who heard him could acknowledge that he had a front seat to that invasion. But he'd be hard-pressed to communicate that while it was going on, when the actual battle was unfolding two miles from where he was standing, he had no idea what was happening and no notion who was winning and who might be losing.
Speaker 2:We're so limited in what we know, so pressed to remember correctly and so stressed in how to hold ourselves to the moment. The righteous desire to remember haunts us, which is where Memorial Day comes from. It was first described as Decoration Day and was a description of the practice of strewing flower petals on the graves of the Civil War dead as a way to signal the appreciation of the country for those who had given their lives to defend it. In addition, it was a gesture of honor toward those whose sacrifice had brought about the world known. To those who enacted these honors, the first message was look around the world, you know, is because of them. Honor their lives and their death. This symbol of honor caught on throughout the country. The dead to be honored were in virtually every town and in every state, and the desire to remember them was real and purposeful.
Speaker 2:Throughout the end of the 19th century and into the 20th century, the style of this celebration progressed. It also morphed Because of the success of the Union in the Civil War. The country faced a difficult conundrum. If everyone in the country was to celebrate the war dead, then what about those of the former Confederacy? What were they to do about their dead? On the one hand, their taking up arms against the Union was the cause of the war and the means of the death of those whose graves were being honored. On the one hand, their taking up arms against the Union was the cause of the war and the means of the death of those whose graves were being honored. On the other hand, union victory was the preservation of a country united in purpose and structure. Decoration Day, with the strewing of flowers over the graves of the Union dead and the subsequent honoring of their sacrifice for the preservation of one country, faced the challenge of those who had died in the other part of the one country now preserved. What to do about them? Ultimately, the power of forgetting forged a new celebration. As the sharp ends of the conflict faded, it became possible to talk about the horrors of the war as war, in the celebration and honoring of those who had fought in it. When the desire to remember the sacrifices endured by the men who had fought the war began to dominate the discussion, the national decision was made to throw a cape over all the suffering and to count it as one national object of memory. This isn't quite as nefarious as it sounds.
Speaker 2:One of my uncles fought in the 45th Infantry Division which had the record of the most continuous days in combat in World War II. He was with them from the invasion of Italy at the Gulf of Salerno in 1943 to the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp in 1945. When he came back home he almost never talked about his experiences, except to tell funny stories about some of the times when he was overseas. But for the last 15 years of his life his closest friend was a fellow veteran with whom he shared his stories and talked about his experiences With his friend. He talked about his service with them more than with anyone else, and the most remarkable part of this was that this veteran that he shared his stories with was a survivor of the German army in Italy. They were on opposite sides during the war, but their stories were all the same. The officers never really knew what was going on. The soldiers mostly didn't have enough to eat and couldn't keep warm. Death could come at any time and from any direction, and young men could find almost anything funny and could endure almost any hardship. Together they had all this in common. He found more companionship in his enemy comrade-at-arms than from anyone else in his generation. They all suffered together and their suffering created a bond, so it is with soldiers.
Speaker 2:Memorial Day morphed into this common bond of suffering that now invites us to honor all our dead in all our wars. We're to remember all those lives sacrificed in the battles that our country has deemed to fight. We're urged to remember and to celebrate what they gave us and what it cost them to respond to the call of arms. It has become very fashionable to deprecate those who went off to war. There's no end of the books in our age calling into question every military conflict we've opted for, from the Revolution to the Civil War, to World Wars I and II, all the way to our engagements in the Middle East, and I encourage everyone to read them and to evaluate them on their merits.
Speaker 2:It's the measure of a free people to question the dictums of their government and the decisions made from the past. Everyone gets the chance to second-guess what was done in the name of our people. There's nothing new about that. Ulysses Grant criticized the Mexican-American War, in which he was involved as a young officer, even though it brought half of the territory of Mexico into the United States. He decried it as unjust and unnecessary. It's a sign of healthy skepticism that we wonder what those who act in our name are up to, and it's a traditional aspect of our Americanism. But as we do, we should also keep in mind that every such decision made in our name also involves young soldiers who act with their lives to enact these decisions and to make them real. Honoring their sacrifice makes the imperative to question even more pressing.
Speaker 2:We shouldn't diminish the meaning of the blood poured out by those who were called to act and to die as time passes and our righteous skepticism grows. We honor our point of view more by honoring those who were killed in the defense of the country's decisions to act. And let us not forget our responsibility as Catholics in the sum of memorializing the dead. We believe that the dead have not passed away from us, but remain a part of us. They're not simply gone. They remain in our memory and as part of our fellowship in Christ. All death is the result of the sin, of the fall. We mourn the tragedy of it, but following Christ is also done in the midst and the complications and intricacies of this world, including the hard truths and the mean challenges of the military. Young men die because they are the means by which kings and peoples and governments exercise their sovereignty as they die. They are part of the body of Christ. We cannot forget them, nor can we diminish their lives. We owe it to the faithful expression of our connection to them to remember, to memorialize them and their place in our lives. As we honor them, we honor our own call to faithful practice and meaningful witness.
Speaker 2:Memorial Day should be something more than simply the chance for a day off and perhaps the first weekend at the lake, or an evening cookout. It's the beginning of summer and there's nothing wrong with that. At the same time, we have the imperative to keep in mind all those whose lives have been intertwined with the exigencies of the age. Some of us mark our calendars with who won the last election or which companies scored the most in the stock market. Some others of us hold to the ups and downs of the faces and reputations at the forefront of popular attention. Others mark their time by the questions of the day and the quotidian outrages that occupy the concern of everyone. But all of us owe it to ourselves and to the truth of our humanity to pause for a moment and to strive to remember those who, if we did not strive so, we'd never bring to mind their examples, and their lives would simply pass away from us and the truth of their death would never make a mark. So on this Memorial Day weekend, we might take a moment to recall what we blank from our memories so often, which is we are the product of the life and death of those who, in the name of honor, took up the challenge laid out to them by their leaders to make their world safe and good. There is a place for them in our memories. We should also find a place for them in our hearts and in our prayers Back.
Speaker 2:In just a moment we come to our final segment Faith in Verse. We have a poem today called At Morning Time. It's quiet now, as it always is. This early hour, all that's loud is quelled in silent power, allowing me to pause and ponder in the dark the deeper laws carrying me to the surest mark. I'm grateful now, as rightly I should be, for all I am allowed and all that is given to me.
Speaker 2:My life has been blessed, my prospects glowing, never truly pressed by contrary waters flowing. All is good now as I see the fullest span as life, flowers and seeds for future plans and solemn prospects in the night, so dark by daylight, intersect, glowing to brightest mark. It's all God's now who whispers as begins the day in the what and how, as I petition and inveigh. No hour not held here. In the divine hand, all living parts meld according to holy plans. If I care to look now, if in silence I can hear from the heavenly bower as divine draws near and trust in all he gives meant for me in this hour, so truly I can live sustained by his quiet power. That's At Morning Time.
Speaker 1:I hope that in the weeks to come you can continue to join us as we are reminded of what it means to be Living Catholic. Living Catholic is a production of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City for Oklahoma Catholic Radio. To learn more, visit okcrorg.