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
Weaving Beliefs: Navigating Faith and Cultural Crossroads | August 31, 2025
In this episode, Father Wolf takes us on a fascinating journey through the missionary work of Oklahoma priests in Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala, revealing profound lessons about faith, culture, and effective evangelization.
The story begins with a penetrating question about how missionaries addressed the syncretistic blend of Catholic and Mayan beliefs among the Tzʼutujil people. This launches an exploration of Guatemala's complicated religious history, where post-independence anti-clerical policies severely restricted Catholic ministry for over a century. With Spanish priests expelled and only two dozen clergy remaining for the entire country, isolated communities like Santiago Atitlan were essentially abandoned, forcing the indigenous people to maintain their faith with minimal guidance.
Without consistent pastoral leadership, the Tzʼutujil naturally integrated Catholic practices with their pre-existing Mayan worldview. Even the American culture blends Christian elements with contradictory values, demonstrating that no society perfectly embodies gospel teachings.
What makes the Oklahoma missionaries' approach remarkable was their pastoral sensitivity. Rather than condemning local practices outright, they invested time understanding Tzʼutujil culture and beliefs. They recognized, as early Church fathers did, that indigenous cultures often contain "seeds of faith" that provide natural bridges to Christian understanding. Building on existing foundations – celebrations of Christmas and Easter, familiarity with baptism and Eucharist – they gradually guided people toward orthodox practice while respecting cultural identity.
This "make haste slowly" approach acknowledges that cultural transformation requires patience, love, and acceptance. By meeting people where they were while lovingly leading them toward fuller faith expression, these missionaries embodied Christ's own method of transformation. Their example challenges us to examine how we might bridge cultural divides in our own evangelization efforts today.
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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 and rector of the Shrine of Blessed Stanley Rother. A couple of weeks ago I was leading a group through the museum at the Shrine when one of them asked me a rather penetrating question. Actually, it went to the heart of the pastor life that all priests are concerned about, although it was pitched to me as a peculiarity of the life in the ministry of Fr Rother. And the minute I heard it, the quest for the answer had me intrigued. And the question had to do with a complicated history of the people of Santiago and the development of their Catholic faith there. And it was this Given that the Tsutuhil people of Santiago had a syncretistic understanding of the practice of the faith, with their Mayan beliefs woven into the Catholic practices, what did the Oklahomans do to minister to them? It was a good question, exactly on target, capturing the life of the people and the work of the priests there in the mission. I was trying to explain the situation the Oklahomans found as they arrived in Santiago.
Speaker 2:In the intricate history of the church in the state of Guatemala, there had been a long stretch of inattention to the pastoral life of Santiago. This was highlighted by the fact that the constitution of Guatemala adopted after their independence from Spain, was anti-clerical and anti-Spanish, and while the latter is easy to understand anti-Spanish, since they were asserting their independence from Spain, the former anti-Catholic was a bit harder to make sense out of. But in their assertion of the power of the state, the new government wanted to assert its fullest control over the life of the Catholic Church, and to accomplish this they made it maximally difficult for the Church to minister to its people. Needless to say, this made for complicated arrangements of priorities for the bishops and the hierarchs of the country. As a consequence of the decision to limit Spanish influence, all Spanish priests had to leave the country. This left the country with something like two dozen priests to staff the entire church there. That was after the revolution. In addition, the funding for all church activities was after the revolution. In addition, the funding for all church activities was in the hands of the officials in the capital, which limited any activity or initiative the clergy or lay leaders could take. The nascent government wanted to be sure there would be no opposition to its programs. Now much the same was going on all across Europe at the time. So, following the model of government action there.
Speaker 2:Catholic life in Guatemala was hamstrung in just about every area, which of course was the intention. Amid this crackdown on the life of the parishes, most of the religious orders were also banned. Many of them have worked for generations in the country and were represented in many of the educational institutions there. They were a conduit for much of the talent available to the people of the country, as well as being a pipeline for money and other resources to the pastoral life. The founders of the country wanted to ensure there would be one sole source of leadership, and that would be from their initiatives to enact a secular government. The church, in their opinion, had to take a back seat in order to make Guatemala great.
Speaker 2:The starvation of parochial life had a huge impact on the most isolated places. With so few clergy and with such limited options, it was only natural the bishop would work to respond to the most people in the most favorable circumstances. Those who were not from the areas where the population was concentrated or from the places that were most favored were mostly left out In this new environment. Nobody knew what to do or what was the most appropriate way to deal with what was left to them. Society was structured so as to be sure the church remained handicapped or at least neutered. This was by intention in Guatemala at the time. It remained so for more than a hundred years. Controlling the Catholic church was the premier priority there. This affected the isolated and culturally unique people of Santiago Atitlan. They were set apart in the highlands by the difficult geography there and by their unique cultural practices and language.
Speaker 2:In the face of the absence of pastoral leadership, the people of the parish of Santiago were thrown back on their own limited resources. Given that they were immersed in poverty and suffered from the lack of education and formation, their foundations were thin. It had not always been so. According to Fr McSherry, who had taken the place of Fr Rother after his murder, the history of the parish of Santiago Atitlan included a great deal of pastoral initiative. While working to restore the buildings in the parish compound, he found that the parish had a long history of intensive investment in the pastoral life from the beginning. Built in 1547, the church itself was only one part of an intricate series of structures designed to help form the people in the faith when the pilgrims were still 50 years from landing at Plymouth Rock. There in Santiago, there was a school of evangelization, a society for lay ministry, a translation commission and a series of guilds set up for parish activities that had been organized and staffed in the parish of Santiago Atitlan, there in the Mayan highlands. It was a remarkable place. No doubt these investments contributed to the evangelization of the peoples there.
Speaker 2:Indeed, the Spanish evangelical efforts in the New World, of which this was just a small part, was the most successful evangelization in the entire history of Christianity. The Spanish effort was intent on transforming the culture of the people so that it, the culture, would carry the message of Christ forward in the most comprehensive and intricate ways into the hearts of everyone Throughout Latin America. These efforts proved to be quite fruitful. They were powerfully effective in creating a matrix of cultural beliefs and practices. Now, all evangelization is built on the basics of the culture and the practice of the people who receive the message of Christ.
Speaker 2:They find the message as it comes to them, amid the language and practices they know and understand, because it is Christ's message. It challenges them to live up to it. It's also a judgment on what they know and do. Becoming believers, they begin to change and conform their lives to the promise of Jesus' forgiveness and the prospect of freedom in Christ. This is the challenge everyone everywhere faces when the message of the gospel reaches them. Everyone who hears the gospel hears it and lives it inside the culture of belief, but of course it's incomplete. There is no culture fully committed to making the message of Christ completely transparent and whole. There is no human heart not afflicted with the difficulties of sin, no person's soul without the darkness of selfishness. There's no social conscience not troubled by the limitations of resentment. There's no social conscience not troubled by the limitations of resentment, and so there is no group of people who carry a pristine, pure presence of Christ into the world. Societal structures can help people achieve the ideal of a person made completely new in Christ, but those structures all fall short because they are societies of men, not of angels, and since every culture has been formed by the powers of this world, they constantly have to be remade in the power of the gospel. Even when there are victories in shaping the vision and the practice of society, they're not complete or final. They have to be continually reinforced and regularly buttressed in order to remain so.
Speaker 2:Conversion of society is much like the conversion of an individual. Who among us can say we have embraced the message of Christ so fully and so thoroughly. There is nothing of the old us left in our lives. Even St Paul, who was such a powerful example of conversion, described himself as one who did what he did not want to do, who found himself acting against his own intentions and his own deeper desires. We of lesser timber have to be at work continually in order to keep our lives tuned to the fullest expression of Christ among us, and as it is with each individual, so it is with all of us together.
Speaker 2:In our culture, the work of conversion is incomplete. The examples, of course, are all around us. We're most aware of our own culture here in the US and the challenges we face as a people of God. It's true, us culture has been deeply influenced by the gospel. It structures our self-understanding and has been molded by the desire of the people to be faithful to Jesus and his teaching. Gk Chesterton described us as a nation with the soul of a church. Gk Chesterton described us as a nation with the soul of a church, and so it has been for us from the time of our founding up to today. At the same time, with all this being true, it's easy to see our own limitations With all of the energy and intent poured into every corner of culture, we're still not redolent of the teachings of Jesus.
Speaker 2:We still find it necessary to sustain the largest military in the world, costing more than a trillion dollars a year. We have 10,000 nuclear weapons, primed for readiness for our defense or offense, each a nightmare of destructiveness. We justify the killing of a million children a year in their mother's wombs in the name of freedom unconstrained, even at the cost of death. And we've normalized tragedy in our society today, with fatherless families, unformed masculine virtues, barren lives, flourishing evil and the breakdown of relations between men and women. All these things existed previously, but only during times of famine, war and plague, and now they're normal every day. We are a society formed by Christian virtues and yet we are resolutely not quite Christian.
Speaker 2:In Santiago Atitlan, during the interruption provided by the revolution, the people of the parish were thrown back on themselves With all of the work done with them up to that point. Their language was still unwritten, the promise of education was incomplete and they had no expansive leadership. Almost no one could read and the common language was not Spanish. So they were isolated from society at large and they were very poor, which meant they had very little contact with the outside world. What was available to them were the basics of their culture, which would be the case in any situation like that. Take away everything else and what's left are the practices that make up the common content of every day For the people of Santiago. Without the directed guidance of the clergy, it became normal for their prior beliefs to become mixed with the elements and articles of Catholic life, producing their own blend of beliefs and practices. Again, that's not unique to them. It's an element of the development every culture has when it's formed in the light of the gospel.
Speaker 2:How many of us know the Irish beliefs about leprechauns and banshees as part of Irish folklore and cultural understanding? Those beliefs stayed around a thousand years after intensive Christian evangelization and cultural adaptation. Now we might laugh at those stories now and think of them as quaint and charming, but they were neither quaint nor charming in the lives of those who invested their time and energy in them. Or better to say, these old beliefs lay net to the proclamations and assurances of the Christian life, so that the old ways of Irish living formed part of the tapestry of authentic belief. There. The fabric of Irish belief had its peculiar texture in which the threads lay next to one another in distinctive patterns. It was that way among the Tsutuhil as well.
Speaker 2:There are a series of books that made a splash a couple of years ago, written by an American, that described the cosmology and religion of the Tsutuhil people. The author celebrates the fact that the mythic and folkloric elements of Mayan life live next door to the Catholic overlay of spirituality and practice among the people there. Of course, he is a non-believer and is actively hostile to the church. So he celebrates the Mayan understanding of life and deprecates the Christian version, although both are woven into the other, a fact he never seems to realize. And with so many modern descriptions of peculiar versions of Christian practice, the less European it is, the more authentic it's presumed to be by him. In his opinion, it's at least charming the things they believe. At most it's an alternative way in his mind, a superior way to see the world and to live life.
Speaker 2:And so what was the pastoral team to do when they arrived in Santiago to begin their mission work? The people thought they themselves were faithful. Of course, if a survey had been taken and people asked what religion they were, they would have said Catholic without hesitation. But the scarcity of clergy and the isolation and poverty of the village had deprived them, by that time, of a priest in the village for more than a hundred years. Hardly anyone in the town had gone to Mass more than five times his entire life.
Speaker 2:Being Catholic meant something different for the native Tsutuhil than for the Americans who arrived, all of whom had, for example, gone to Mass every day for most of their lives. What were they going to do with this challenge to their practice and their belief? Father David Monaghan, in his unpublished book about Fr Rother, described what the mission team found when they arrived in the village. When they first began to celebrate Sundays, there were perhaps five people in some who went to Mass. The church itself belonged, in the mind of the villagers, to the elders who sponsored and performed their rituals and prayers there.
Speaker 2:The first missionary responsibility was to claim the church for their own rights. The second was to come to know what the people thought and believed. One of the members of the team was an anthropologist who'd come to work there in Santiago just so that the belief system of the people there could be studied and understood. This approach has a long provenance in Latin America. Some of the oldest ethnology and anthropology we have in the world comes from the missionaries in Mexico who wrote up long descriptions of the practice of the people they were pastoring. Much of the understanding we have of these long-ago cultures come from the careful eye of those who are tasked with their conversion.
Speaker 2:The Oklahoma team did the same. As they came to know, they worked to incorporate these beliefs into the teaching and exposition of the life of the faith. Historically this has been the practice of Christian missionary efforts since the opening generations of the faith. The early church fathers believed the seeds of the faith had been planted in the cultures and beliefs of people all over the world just so that the Spirit could animate them and provide a bridge to the truth of Christ. As the great teacher Tertullian put it at the end of the second century the soul is naturally Christian, which means that all that feeds the soul is naturally Christian, which means that all that feeds the soul inclines it toward an understanding and appreciation of God's revelation in Christ. So also the Tzutuhil were open to the fullest revelation of Jesus' life, death and resurrection for our salvation. As their culture and beliefs oriented them toward the preaching of Jesus, the Oklahomans could build on that.
Speaker 2:There was the additional complication, of course, that the nature of belief was all jumbled up Again. That's not an element of Sioux to Heal culture. We know the same aspect in our own culture. It's a truism. But we all know that there are sincere people who don't know, for example, it's a truism, but we all know that there are sincere people who don't know. For example, that the phrase waste not, want not, isn't from the Bible but from American Puritan culture. It sounds congenial to our ears but it's not revelation. The same goes for neither a borrower nor a lender be. There are echoes of this intent in the scriptures, but this phrase comes from a peculiar cultural adaptation of Revelation, not from the scriptures. And on and on and on.
Speaker 2:When a culture is formed by the faith, the culture and the faith can become jumbled so thoroughly it's hard to tell one from the other. In fact, after a while the ones who are part of the culture can't tell the difference. The different threads can reinforce the other, especially because they are different from one another, but it's important to remember the threads. Culture and faith are not the same. The Tsutuhil culture was thoroughly mixed with Catholic practice. It took real dedication to reinforce the essential elements of Catholic belief and then to separate them from the foreign elements that lay beside them. But this is what the Oklahomans did, and this is the most important element in understanding the Oklahoman response in the village. They didn't run around and tell everyone they were wrong and their culture was awful. That's certainly been a popular theme in American religious talk for the last 80 years or so, but it hasn't been notoriously successful in achieving pure religion. Just cruise around on the internet and listen to notable Christian sermons from the most popular churches, especially during the election season. Listening to those, you would realize we have not yet achieved a religion purged of the effects of our cultural presumptions and set free from our native points of view.
Speaker 2:No careful pastoral work is to bring people along, carefully nurturing the essentials of their faith and practice while at the same time leading them away from whatever abuses and misunderstandings there might be there. It's delicate work. It requires careful accompaniment and dedicated appreciation of the gifts of the people's culture. It's not always obvious how to achieve good results. There's the continual complaint in the eyes of some that the missionaries don't go fast enough or that they weren't thorough enough. They want purity and perfection from the first moment. But the challenge of ministry isn't as simple as aiming at a target and pulling the trigger to slay it. It's more like finding and then stalking the prey. How straight you shoot doesn't matter if you can't find what you're hunting for. That's the challenge coming to know what you can say and how you can teach, and then begin the teaching.
Speaker 2:The great advantages the Oklahomans had was the overlay of Christian behavior and expectations on the Mayan culture. Already the people celebrated Christmas and Easter, they had an idea of the example of the saints, they knew about baptism and the Eucharist and they were familiar with the ideals of marriage and purity. And while they did not live out what they knew always which is a common experience everywhere they did know what was expected of them and what was the norm. The missionaries' best advantage was that they could build an intact structure of correct belief on the solid stones that had been set in place so many years before, even if those stones had been weathered or were covered in moss, they set out to guide their people into correct practice and orthodox belief. Not only that, they wanted as best they could to help the people appreciate and honor their culture. Of course, some of the practices would have to change. They could no longer, for example, maintain their belief in a companion god to the one god, which was one of their quote-unquote adaptations to the faith. Nor could they continue to maintain their practice of how to establish a family. Their version was that a man and woman begin to live together after they'd had their first child. Then they would decide whether they wanted to marry or not. It wasn't until this point in their lives together that the decision was expected to become permanent Again.
Speaker 2:The alteration in their ways of life took time. It produced a series of funny conversations among the people there. For example, the elders of the village were arguing with their pastors that the young people were loco to imagine that a couple could make a decision and enter into a commitment before they lived together and had a child. The elders considered it complete madness and foolish innovation. These were the same elders who were also hesitant to forbid the statue of the little local god, kept in a small house on the village square, to be paraded around town on major feast days. Young people thought it blasphemous, the older folks not so much. Old ways and new ways jostled each other for dominance, because it takes a while to make things clear and certain for everyone.
Speaker 2:The Italian admonition seemed to be appropriate there Make haste slowly. In truth, the Oklahomans in Santiago Atitlan did what the pastors of their parishes in Oklahoma do everywhere they came to know their people and their beliefs and practices. They worked to understand what was really going on in the parish and then they dedicated themselves to guiding their people toward a more full and a more complete way to honor God and His revelation in their lives. They corrected what was wrong and worked to refine what was right and good and, most of all, they loved their people enough to accept them and then to lead them. All good pastors do the same and remember it's not too much of an exaggeration to imagine that the pastors here, as well as the pastors there, were working with the same challenges bringing the culture of belief and practice into something closer to the presence of Christ. We're still at work here. I'm sure they're still at work there, back in just a moment. Back in just a moment. Welcome back to our final segment Faith in Verse.
Speaker 2:We have a poem today called Days of Cloud and Rain. Are the days of cloud and rain gloomy? Find another word for all that we see, we of sun and sky and open horizons here condemn the days of weather now severe. We're likely to look at clouds and then dismiss when sunlight and breezes are all amiss, sniff at the needful rain and plump showers as though we could absent lawns and flowers, pretending we're content with the endless blue. Have enough of sprinkles and heavy dews. No, let us embrace the darkening skies when the thunder rumbles and the lightning plies. To love falling rain, all precipitation, endless sun to be but degradation, and embrace this lovely world all we all know when the sun shines and clouds form and waters flow.
Speaker 2:That's Days of Cloud and Rain. The invitation that we have as believers is, and especially those who are dedicated to proclaiming the message of Christ, is to meet those that we want to witness to and that we want to influence where they are. If we wait for them to come to us, we have not fulfilled the invitation to go out, to put out into the deep, as the bishop says. That's the invitation that we have. That's what Living Catholic is about that we have a chance to dive deeply into what we believe so that we're more apt to, on that deep level, encounter those who are among us. I hope you can join us in the weeks to come.
Speaker 1:Living Catholic is a production of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City for Oklahoma Catholic Radio. To learn more, visit okcrorg.