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
Collar Chronicles: My Roommate, the Priest | August 10, 2025
In this episode, Father Wolf continues his "Tales from the Rectory" series, offering rare insights into the unique living arrangements of Catholic priests. Drawing inspiration from Bishop Francis Clement Kelly's work, he shares personal stories revealing how priests navigate sharing their homes with colleagues they didn't choose.
• Priest rectories in the US typically house multiple clergy who must learn to live together without any formal training
• Unlike other professions, priests have no say in who they'll share living quarters with—an arrangement that's simply presumed and accepted
• These living situations create both challenges and opportunities for unlikely but enriching friendships
• Formal interactions between Father Gallatin and Father Boeckman reveal how even priests who lived together for years maintain complex relationships
• Priest personalities are shaped differently than others, formed by the "frictions of their lives" rather than family relationships
• Pastoral ministry includes managing unexpected interruptions and unreasonable demands with patience and grace
• The poem "In the Land of Abundance" reflects on finding gratitude amid scarcity rather than comfort
Join us as we continue exploring the human side of priesthood and the deeper dimensions of living our Catholic faith.
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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 Sacred Heart Parish in Oklahoma City and rector of the Shrine of Blessed Stanley Rother. Last week I began a brief series on tales from the rectory in imitation of a work by the same name authored by Bishop Francis Clement Kelly, the second bishop of Oklahoma City in Tulsa. It was a work in which he presented brief encounters with people who came to the rectory looking for the priests there, a work in which he presented brief encounters with people who came to the rectory looking for the priests there In his book. The encounters were brief and usually pointed, and they made for brief morality tales in which a good lesson could be drawn. The bishop was a good storyteller and his books were interesting. I decided last week to imitate his attempt and begin to tell a few tales of my own, and I decided to continue this week.
Speaker 2:Priests' lives are not configured in the same way as others' lives. That's a given for just about everyone. It's part of the mystique that surrounds our lives. We don't go about our days just like everyone else. It's not so ethereal as some might imagine. We don't spend our whole days meditating in church or buried in our books. There's a lot more to running a parish than preparing our sermons or practicing with the choir. At the same time, we aren't on the clock, we're not sprinting toward the door at 5 pm in order to escape the confines of the office to make it to the haven awaiting on the other side of our thresholds. Our lives look different, and that includes how we get along with one another.
Speaker 2:One of the curious parts of the priestly life in the United States is how we priests live together. Part of the support that we receive in the parish is that our room and board is provided for us. That makes for a substantial part of our compensation. No matter where we're assigned, no matter the situation in the parish and no matter what shape things are in, we're guaranteed a place to lay our heads, out of the weather and usually in normal comfort. Every parish you know of has a rectory configured with it. It's part of the architecture of our lives as priests. This also means we end up living together with one another. It's not all of us, it might not even be the most of us, but our arrangements also include that we share the quarters we have with those who work with us in the parish. Just about every priest who gets ordained begins his priesthood by moving into a rectory with his pastor and beginning his ministry learning the ropes, which includes learning how to live together. That's something to keep in mind when talking to your pastor or the priest. You know they have the experience of living with someone else in a house that does not belong to them. It's different in other countries and it has been configured differently at other times.
Speaker 2:My most poignant example of this reality is a novel by Canon PA Sheehan entitled my First Curate. It was published in 1900, and it details the interactions of an old pastor who's just received notice of an associate pastor for the first time in his small Irish parish. What makes the novel most notable in our contemporary eyes is that the pastor's first crisis was to find a house for his associate to live in. It was unthinkable in the Irish church that the pastor and the associate would live together in the same house, but in the US, in the way we do things here, it is not. So we live together, and this arrangement isn't always easy.
Speaker 2:First of all because, while priests may be chosen of God and entrusted to be stewards of the mysteries of the faith, in our daily habits and frailties. We're also just ordinary human beings and being ordinary we don't always get along easily. It's one thing to face the challenges of leading the parish and shepherding our flock. It's an entirely other thing to learn to get along with the person you work with by living with him 24 hours a day. There's no other profession I know of in which the expectation is that a pastor will be assigned a roommate with whom he is expected to live and get along with in his house all the while he is mentoring and teaching him. But it is so with us. In fact, it is so firmly written into the life of the priesthood in our day and time that no one asks any of us about it at all. Priests are assigned, associates are named, transfers take place and no one pauses to ask what anyone thinks about going off to live in another place with another priest.
Speaker 2:It's simply presumed. Over the course of my priesthood since the year 2000, I've had 15 associate pastors who've moved into the rectory with me and not once have I been asked by anyone what I think of the person who might be moving in or what difficulties I could anticipate in living with them, or what I might want when it comes to having someone share my life with me Not to put too fine a point on it, but priests are no more consulted about who they're expected to live with, and that is, to eat with, share their work with, pray with and converse with. Every day, then a bus driver is consulted about the people he picks up on his route. Most of the time, our acceptance of such expectation is simply presumed, given that we don't have alternatives, no one would know what to do. If the question was asked do you want to live with this man? And answered in the negative, what would the parish do? What would the bishop do if the answer was no I don't want to live with this man and answered in the negative, what would the parish do? What would the bishop do If the answer was no I don't want to? So the question is never asked, which makes for some tensions.
Speaker 2:The worst I experienced was when I attended the National Federation of Priests Council's convention in Toronto, canada. As I was checking in, I met a priest from Tulsa in the lobby, toronto Canada. As I was checking in, I met a priest from Tulsa in the lobby and as I was getting my key, he told me what was happening in the archdiocese that is, in the other diocese that he didn't belong to here in Oklahoma. About a minute after I met him, he told me that my associate in my parish was being transferred to another parish and that a priest from India was going to be assigned to me. Now, no one had told me either of those things. A priest from another diocese informed me while we were in another country, not only about what was happening in my parish, but that I'd soon be sitting around my own dining room table three times a day with someone I had not met, did not know and had never been told about. And nobody thought such an arrangement was odd at all. It does make for odd moments, I'll grant you that. On the other hand, the assignment system makes for the chance to develop some unlikely friendships that are all the richer for being unlikely.
Speaker 2:If we lived only with those with whom we were comfortable, or only those men we already liked, we would certainly miss the opportunity to grow in the depth and appreciation of one another that comes from sharing our lives together. You can't share a house and a pastorate without coming to know another person with some level of appreciation and gratitude and besides, no matter what you think of the other guy who's with you at the table. You're stuck with him in this arrangement. You might as well make the best of it to the best of your ability. What else is there to do, after all? Rage against the machine.
Speaker 2:Learning to live together isn't always easy. Of course, no one teaches another how to create the harmony in camaraderie necessary for a successful tenure as pastor and associate in the same house. There are no courses, no instructions about how this is supposed to happen. It's all on-the-job training. And such arraignments always come with the necessary built-in mistakes of all relationships. Pastors don't always read their associates the right way. Associates don't always understand their pastors for who they are and what they're about. It's an inevitability in our ways of living and doing and being.
Speaker 2:My first pastor, for example, was adamant in his skepticism concerning all Catholic moral theology. He regarded any book on morals, no matter when it was published, to be a book of excuses for people to do what they wanted to do. In his mind, there were ten commandments, and that should be enough for anyone. Anything else was just an excuse. I, on the other hand, was passionate about moral theology. Would you know? I just received, and then read, a three-volume collection of essays on the fundamentals entitled Free and Faithful in Christ, by the renowned theologian Bernard Herring.
Speaker 2:At breakfast one morning I was trying to explain how excited I was reading these essays and how important they were in developing the thinking of the church throughout the world as people everywhere faced complicated moral problems. My pastor let out a long sigh and said If it were up to me, I'd cancel every moral theology class in seminaries and replace them with ascetic theology. His point of view was that people needed to learn how to get along with the difficulties of life, make the hard decisions that needed to be made and then endure the pain involved. People don't like pain. That's why the world is in such bad shape. That was his opinion, and he made me so mad I didn't speak to him for the rest of the day. I don't think he regarded that as an ascetical challenge, but it was an example of learning to live with one another. It wasn't the only one, and not all of the examples of what I had to learn were so rarefied, but I did have to learn, and so did he.
Speaker 2:So one day, when I was in the rectory in Eden I was the associate pastor there in 1985. I'd been there for about a year it was my fifth year since ordination. I walked out of my room and into the living room and as I did I saw Father Charlie Beckman. He had been a pastor in Enid about 15 years before. On that day he stopped by the rectory to say hello, as was his custom. He came in the back door unannounced, in the safe familiarity of our small town, in our comfortable presbyterate. He'd been my grandmother's pastor in Okarchi for years and I had met him and talked to him all through the time I was in the seminary and in the years I'd been ordained. We were not intimate friends but we were acquaintances. So I addressed him as I always did. I said oh hello, charlie. How are you? Oh, fine, don. He said good to see you. I'm up to see the dentist and I thought I'd drop by to see how you guys are doing. How's Enid? He asked.
Speaker 2:As this brief interchange was going on, father Paul Gallatin, the pastor, came out of his room. He had been Charlie's associate pastor for nine years when he was first ordained. In fact, he was Charlie's first associate and, as it turned out, the only one he ever had. Their time together was notable for both of them. Each had helped the other turn a corner in their priesthood and their maturity in their personal lives. As I've said, learning to live together is a challenge that carries with it its own rewards.
Speaker 2:And then the moment came. The two of them spotted one another and Paul spoke first. Hello, father Beckman, he said solemnly, as if he were meeting the president of the local school district, and Charlie responded hello, father Gallatin, with all the same solemnity. Paul might as well have been titled the vicar general in Charlie's voice. They'd known each other for 30 years, had sat at the same table every day for nine years, had worked together to build a parish and operate a school, and they were as formal and stiff with one another as if they had met only at that moment. They were gracious to each other and they were civil to one another. Each told the other of their whereabouts and concerns, touching on the ins and outs of their respective parishes and the challenges they faced there. Altogether, the conversation lasted hardly ten minutes they faced there. Altogether. The conversation lasted hardly 10 minutes, and it ended when Charlie bid me goodbye by name and told me to stop by and visit him when I passed through town. They together were formal, even friendly, but they were guarded in their distance from one another as fiercely as two watchdogs on adjoining lawns. His last words out the door were on adjoining lawns. His last words out the door were goodbye, father Gallatin.
Speaker 2:Sometimes we learn to live only by understanding the appropriate distances we need, and in many cases the wisdom we long for comes only by experience and reflection learned exclusively in the interchange of life and goodness with one another. Priests are always challenged to build their lives in the most productive and positive ways possible. Of course, everyone faces this same challenge, but this is most often achieved by way of the supportive and continual interchange with a spouse. We're invited to achieve our lives differently. If it seems that we have a hard surface or a jagged facade, it's because our interactions have less of a chance to be mellowed or softened by a spousal nurture. It's one of the obstacles we face, but I also have to say it makes us different. The men I know who've been shaped by the frictions of their lives, well-lived with one another, are some of the most generous and responsive people I've ever known. Both Father Gallatin and Father Beckman were warm and open to me, but it was their lives together that had contributed to what they had to offer, even if it was more the case that they were shaped by the sparks that leap when rocks are struck than of a baker who shapes the softened dough before putting it into the oven. They had to learn from one another. And another story Pastors want to help the people they serve, no matter how gruff we are or how inconsiderate we can become.
Speaker 2:We enter this vocation in order to help people. A parish pastor guides his people and works to be their shepherd because he wants them to do well, both in their spiritual lives as well as in their day-to-day journey in the world. For the most part, as I have observed, pastors do help people. I also have to say it's not always obvious. Sometimes the good pastor, the shepherd, leaves his flock toward is neither obvious nor desired on the part of the sheep, and more than once I've seen shepherds who've become confused and lost as they roam the wilderness, unsure of where they are to go. These challenges don't excuse poor pastoral leadership, but they sometimes explain how it is that pastors don't always know how to respond or what to do.
Speaker 2:There is at least one other element to the types of leadership I've noticed of pastors the sideways glance. This was best embodied by Father Archie Beckman At his funeral mass. Father Carson Crittenbrink described it best and gave us a clear picture of the pastoral leadership Fr Beckman had been so noted for. This priest, fr Crittenbrink said, was generous and kind, thoughtful and careful. He was always trying to be helpful and look for ways to open doors for people who felt like they themselves felt like could give up. He was all these things as long as he thought you weren't looking. The minute he thought you were looking, he went out of his way to appear gruff and curmudgeonly. The minute you noticed his caring side, he showed you something else. I suppose his life could deserve a generous dollop of psychological dressing in order to explain what he so carefully worked to hide. At the same time, whatever the cause of his need to hide his generosity and goodness, it didn't change the truth of these attributes among his people. He was a good and careful pastor. He did work to help the people he served.
Speaker 2:One Sunday afternoon in Altus I lay down to take a nap. I'd been a pastor there in southwest Oklahoma for about a year and a half at that point and my weekends were full. My parish encompassed all of Jackson and Harmon counties and included the parish there in Altus and the mission station in Hollis. I had three Masses on Sunday one in English, one bilingual and one in Spanish. Celebrating the Masses and traveling to the mission and back home also involved driving 75 miles. My responsibilities also included helping out at Altus Air Force Base on Saturdays, hearing confessions there and celebrating Mass.
Speaker 2:Needless to say, when Sunday afternoon came around, I arrived home and I was tired, as I was on this particular Sunday In fact. I pushed the button on my garage door opener, pulled into the garage parking spot next to the kitchen door, made my way into the house and into my bedroom and lay down all in one continual movement with hardly a pause, and I fell asleep in an instant. Some naps are simply to rest your eyes, some are a brief letting go of the moment so as to enjoy a bit of relaxation, and some naps are as if a bolus of anesthetic had been pumped into your veins and you pass from waking to deep sleep in one moment. A moment after my head hit the pillow, I was comatose, and then the phone rang. I jumped out of bed with the awareness that I had to fulfill some obligation. My brain had not yet caught up with my circumstances and all I could register was that I was in my bedroom and there was some requirement pressing in on me. I stood up and went through the doorway and out into the hall and moved toward the chapel.
Speaker 2:In a second or so of waking up, all I knew was that it was Sunday and it felt like I had to get busy. As my faculties slowly awakened, I noticed I had my clothes on. It wasn't morning. The outside light told me it was late afternoon, not dawn, and the quiet told me I wasn't heading for morning mass, but I had just gotten up from a nap. It was all coming together slowly, plus the phone was ringing, so I made my way over to the wall and picked up the receiver, and all this happened, as it does, in about five seconds. I have no idea how long it takes for sensory information to arrive in the brain in a form accessible to reason and memory, but there is some lapse before accumulating it and then before it becomes possible to use it.
Speaker 2:I'd just about closed the gap when I said hello into the mouthpiece. Is this the Catholic Church? Yes, I responded. This is Prince of Peace, catholic Church. That seems superfluous. How else would anyone be calling the office number if they didn't already have it, especially on a Sunday afternoon?
Speaker 2:And then came the next inevitable question what time is your next Mass, next Mass? I paused for a moment and explained it's five o'clock in the evening on Sunday. What do you mean? The next Mass? There isn't another mass today. There have already been four this weekend. You mean you aren't going to offer another mass today?
Speaker 2:I didn't know where this guy was from, but I could tell he hadn't spent a lot of time in southwest Oklahoma, maybe Boston or Chicago, where a church is every mile. But he wasn't from Oklahoma. No, I said there isn't going to be another mass today. You mean you aren't going to offer another mass again today? No, that's right, no more masses today. I thought that settled it, but it didn't. Then what am I going to do? He asked why aren't you going to help me? Don't you care about my soul? He was crazy and outrageous. I would excuse him if he'd been accustomed to the schedules and the fragile heart springs of other priests from those other places, but my day had been full enough and I'd had it, I have to say.
Speaker 2:At that moment a thousand thoughts ran through my head. What I wanted to say was this when I was growing up, there was a graffito on a bridge abutment as you drove out Highway 66 east of Oklahoma City. It said Sinners, hell awaits. I guess that's a message for you. Too bad, you missed Mass mass and there's nothing left to do about it. I have to say it's amazing what the brain can do when it's awake and working.
Speaker 2:That thought appeared in a millisecond. It was followed by a variety of others, even less charitable, but I knew his question was a stranger to my exasperation. So I just ground my teeth, took a breath and said that's all we can do today. Sorry, it's not enough for you. Goodbye. If I was convinced that no one was looking, I might have been tempted to at least imagine homicide or at least some murderous words. Good thing I was aware that God does participate in our lives. Not a bad audience that, in the words of St Thomas, more Inconvenience and incomprehension are the marks of pastoring. Or better to say, they are the faint tracks left among the footprints of the sheep as they're led to water and pasture. It's not easy being a shepherd. Your flock includes the thick, dull and slow, and they are usually not the quiet ones. And so you lead even when the entrance to the evening is rattled by the bleats of the wandering sheep Back in just a moment. Welcome back to our final segment, faith in Verse.
Speaker 2:We have a poem today called In the Land of Abundance.
Speaker 2:It's not easy to be truly grateful in the land of abundance.
Speaker 2:We are no more likely to give true thanks than to go forth in a sun dance.
Speaker 2:Because of us, the goods of the world are simply here, right now, ready at hand.
Speaker 2:We hardly need to acknowledge scrape or bow the framework of our lives. The intricacies that make this so have become invisible to our eyes. We don't notice, we don't know. We make a choice to see, to open ourselves to the facts only when our confidences are shaken and our sureties collapse, and thus the thankful heart grows only in scarcity and among pain, while we become hard and cold amid great luxury and easy gain. Go to the hard places, the empty stores, to find the thankful heart, the divine weights to grant the greatest portion and fullest heart. That's in the land of abundance, thank you. The opportunity we have as we encounter Christ in the fullness of the faith is the opportunity to encounter Him at the depths of our lives, and that includes the facts and the opportunities that fill our lives as we're surrounded by others. I hope that in the weeks to come, all of us together, as we look into our lives, might have the opportunity to encounter Christ more closely. I hope you can join us.
Speaker 1:Living Catholic is a production of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City for Oklahoma Catholic Radio. To learn more, visit okcrorg.