Corruption, Truth and Hope | January 11, 2026

In this episode, we trace how Scripture, history, and lived experience confront modern corruption, then map a practical path toward honesty built on guardrails, subsidiarity, and courage. The call is clear: design for integrity, tell the truth out loud, and hold hope steady in Christ.

• warnings in the Bible against bribes and favoritism
• original sin as a reason for guardrails and audits
• the parish audit story and structural reform
• history’s long record of graft shaping outcomes
• subsidiarity as right-sized decision making
• culture change through truth-telling over image
• Challenger hearings as a model of plain accountability
• active resistance to corruption, not mere avoidance
• hope rooted in Christ as the anchor for reform

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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.

Chapters

• 0:00 Setting The Stage: Corruption Everywhere
• 2:06 Scripture’s Witness Against Bribery
• 5:47 Trust, Lies, And Community Ruin
• 8:19 Original Sin And Necessary Guardrails
• 11:05 The Parish Audit: Hard Lessons
• 13:05 History’s Long Shadow Of Graft
• 16:31 Subsidiarity And Right-Sized Authority
• 18:28 Culture Shaped By Truth Or Power
• 22:11 Challenger, Accountability, And Plain Facts

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:04

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_00: 0:19

Welcome to Living Catholic. I'm Father Don Wolf, pastor of Sacred Heart Parish and rector of the shrine of Blessed Stanley Ruther. All the news over the last couple of weeks seems to be about corruption. Of course, we have to be sensitive to the fact that the news is in the business of selling, and nothing sells better than startling, scandalous information that pricks up our ears and causes us to grind our teeth. So we ought we we have to take all we hear with a bit of seasoning. It's easy to fall into the trap of imagining the worst, or even more perturbing, imagining everything we hear is true just because it's bad. At the same time, it's not hard to be intrigued by the information about fraud, abuse, and corruption. Now I have no information about anything going on when it comes to describing the details of what's being reported in the news. Like everyone else, I watch the different videos and reports as well as the response videos and statements, and I wonder what the real story might be. So I have nothing to add to the hullabaloo other than to note that there are more than a few lessons to be learned concerning the issue of dishonesty. Whatever the actual facts are and what will result from those facts, there are a few things that we ought to pay attention to. In addition, there are some important memories we need to retrieve from the bank of our cultural experience if we want to get to the bottom of what's going on when we hear about these reports. We could call this a moment of reckoning, not because of who might be doing what, but because it's an opportunity to be reminded of who we are and who we ought to be. Now, the first thing to keep in mind is that there is actually quite a lot said about the topic of corruption and bribery in the Bible. While we might be dismayed at the topics the Bible does not cover explicitly, this isn't one of them. There are all kinds of warnings and statutes about bribes and corruptions throughout the scriptures. Needless to say, they admonish us not to take bribes, not to curry favor, and not to cut corners. In the law of Moses, there are many admonitions against favoring one group over another, or making decisions based on the money to be made or to be paid to the one making the decision. And while it stands to reason that laws are the bulwark against corrupt practices, the scriptures also have some additional commentary that expand our point of view in these matters. In the law given to Moses, there are repeated warnings that anyone who acts as a judge should pay attention to the law and its requirements and decide every case based on the demands of the law and it alone. No one should be influenced by the status or identity of the person, but only on the case itself. The law has to be observed and the case oriented by the expectations of the law and nothing else. A judge should not be swayed by a rich man and vote in his favor because of his wealth. At the same time, a judge must not be swayed by a poor man and his obvious hardship. It's the law that must be observed, not the needs or wants or identities of the people involved. In the book of wisdom, there are also several warnings about the influence of bribes. Everyone associated with exercising power must stay clear of them. Once the power of money and position are offered, then justice will not be done and the whole community will suffer. A man who takes a bribe will, after a while, not even know how to consider a case or understand what must be done. Offering to sweeten a deal or influence an outcome's will ruin everyone's trust in what takes place. Bakshish is the grit in the gears of good living. Pour it into the transmission of business or government, and pretty soon the whole machine is ruined. It's corrosive in every part of life. In fact, the prophets themselves use the examples of dishonest dealing to paint a picture of God's judgment on the people. From the fat cats who lie on their beds of ivory when they know the rest of the world sleeps only in their clothes because they have nothing else, to the merchants who use the wrong weights and the small measures, they all make for a world perverted and miserable. They make a world in which God is forgotten and the poor suffer. Ruin will come upon such a place because it has forgotten the gift of good order and decent justice. Bribery, fraud, and deceit tinge every part of life with ruin and destruction. The law implores everyone to act honestly and uprightly so that the whole society is protected and reveals the goodness of God in everything. Failing to do as the law demands undermines trust in everything. It replaces competence with position and merit with influence. This is just as true among us and in every contemporary situation as it was among the men mentioned in the pages of the Old Testament. We can find these arrangements dissolving all manner of relationships and functions. After a while, everyone throws up his hands and says to himself, It doesn't matter what I do, and so it doesn't matter what someone else does. And this affects every level, either by direct involvement, everybody gets a slice of the pie, or by passive acceptance, in which it's presumed everyone is in on it and no one will be held accountable. There is something of the common lesson we have about lying in these scriptures. That is, when no one can trust the truth of what's happening, then everyone suffers. When everyone lies, then no one can tell the truth, since no one will recognize the truth for what it is or what it communicates. Like in journalism, for example, if every outlet and paper lies about what's happening, then no one can trust anything that's reported, even if what's reported happens to be true in every respect. Once the trust in truth is broken, the vessel can't hold any water. Bribery, corruption, scandal, and dishonesty ruin the whole community, not just the people who happen to be involved in it. The second aspect is that it redounds to the truth of original sin. That is, we are not naturally good, free from the corruption, from the temptation to cause and to participate in ruin. In fact, we are weak people who often choose the wrong because it's wrong. We often delight in destruction and prefer what's broken to what isn't. Everyone is tilted toward giving in to dishonesty. Leave it to ourselves and we'll take the shortcut, we'll round off the corners, we'll go the easy way, and deliberately not do what we're supposed to do. Which is why we have to put into place guardrails on everything we do. Without adequate measures to exact honesty and ensure compliance, the natural result will be cheating and fraud. In our day and age, this vigilance is somehow regarded as negative or suspicious, and we're counseled often to avoid it. We're admonished to trust people and to presume on their good intentions and their good nature. But it's foolish to do this. Our nature is tinged by sin and our intentions are easily dark and destructive as they are anything else. So we have to make sure to check and to regulate and to ensure. If we don't, chaos will result. Several years ago there was an audit done in one of the parishes in which I had just arrived. We'd become aware of money going missing, but we didn't know exactly what was happening. All we knew was that things weren't adding up. We had a parishioner who was an accountant, and we asked her to take a look and to see what was what. So she brought back a report of one of our employees who was taking money and who had apparently been doing so for a long, long time. She couldn't even guess how much money might have been stolen over the years that the employee worked there. The accountant also gave the parish a reminder when she reported her findings to the Finance Committee. She said, We made it so easy to steal, we're as much to blame as the person who did the stealing. Making it so easy also made it a nearly irresistible temptation. We didn't just have to get a new employee. We had to get busy changing the way we did business. It was a good lesson. We have to presume the power of original sin at work everywhere. We should also remember that bribery and influence have had a prominent place in our history. Just in case we might be wondering if the news we hear now places us in some sort of national crisis, we should know that the remedy for panic about the present is greater knowledge about the past. In truth, corruption and bribery have had a major influence on all our history. Some might even contend that these energies have shaped our history. Throughout the history of England, for example, bribery and influence were the only way to get any business done. Until the 19th century, for example, it was widely understood that army commissions and ship captaincies had everything to do with how much money a man could bring to the table rather than what might his what his competency might be. It was often the same in the courts. Laws were passed and cases were adjudicated based on how much money could change hands, rather than on their merits or the rightness of the cause. Only when enough defeats had piled up and enough ships had sunk and enough crises of government had exploded did there evolve an ethos of honesty and merit. Just read the novels of Charles Dickens to see the work of bribes and manipulation as they make the lives of the people there miserable. And read the history books to see what policies, what those policies did to see the British response to the challenge of the American revolutionaries. Bribery and corruption formed our history. It was only much later that a notion of fairness and honesty grew up to pervade the halls and of business and of government. We can thank the Puritans for those changes. They were infused with the notion of aiding God in the completion of creation and the perfecting of the world. Both by taking the scriptural admonitions about bribes seriously, as well as knowing that a good heart and a faithful pledge advances the work of God, the Puritan influence began to pervade the whole society. We should also note that capitalism also played its part. Deals done honestly in the light of day and amid the truth enabled businesses to prosper and wealth to be created, both of which also contributed greatly to a notion of straightforwardness and uprightness. Now the U.S. has had a great share of dishonestry and fraud in its history. There were many places famous for corruption and crime, beginning from the founding of the country. One of the most famous names in history is Tammany Hall, a place in which local government existed to reward its friends and punish its enemies. There's nothing new about finding out local governments have facilitated fraud and favored criminal behavior. In fact, one of the characteristics of such fraud is how comprehensive it is and how well known. Robert Cairo's biography of Lyndon Johnson details many of the ways that Johnson was able to be successful as a political force because of his access to money and power through the dark hallways of bribery and influence. And pretty much everybody knew about it, if they themselves weren't already a part of it. Reporters, news networks, fellow politicians, businessmen, the FBI, they were all aware of a gigantic web of people and money that facilitated the work of government Linden's way. And they mostly did nothing about it, at least according to Cairo. It was so much in the open that people joked about it with one another and with the politicians themselves. It was just part of the scenery, part of the scenery of that time. And it's safe to presume this reality was not limited to one man as part of one organization at one sole segment of history. These accusations were widespread and seemed to come from every direction. It was the way the business of government got done. It makes us wonder if there is any other way for this business to take place. There certainly doesn't seem to be, there didn't seem to be during the time covered in Cairo's books. Of course, it always makes us wonder if it happens this way at every time. A third aspect is one the Catholic Church is very aware of and speaks about concerning just about every part of social life, and it's the topic of subsidiarity. This is the conviction that the best way to interact socially and programmatically programmatically is when every part of what takes place happens at the appropriate level of effectiveness. So, for example, if the state of Oklahoma decided that all lawns should be mowed, then the best way to do this would be for every person who has a lawn to find a way to get it mowed. Rather than having a state agency and a statewide mowing group with legions of lawn techs and mower operators, each yard owner would no doubt do a better job of getting his lawn taken care of in the most efficient way. Each organizational initiative should operate at its best functional level, closest to the people and the situation. That's subsidiarity. This seems to have been ignored on a large scale in all the reporting about corruption and graft. The fourth aspect of the topic of corruption and bribery is that such things do shape a culture. The results of their being pervasive and inescapable is that the presumptions of innocence and honesty take a backseat to the exercise of power and influence. When this happens, then all of society is simply the playpen of powerful actors, reducing everyone merely to palms to be moved about on the chessboard by the titans of the time. The results of these presumptions are profound. We generally operate in our society according to the conviction that truth is the best medicine. When it comes time to address our problems, we believe people have to be honest about what's going on and what can be done about it. This truth has to be spoken out loud and owned by those involved. Even when it's painful, speaking honestly and dealing honestly with the problem is the way to make things better. Even if it means people are embarrassed and situations are changed and institutions are challenged. We presume that these approaches provide us with the freedom to act in the ways that will allow the problem to come to some resolution. In other cultures, covering up what really happened in order to preserve face or honor is the preferred method of handling difficulties. In this way, everyone can maintain a level of functioning that will keep society going even when it has been tinged by failure and compromise. It's the story of the movies, on the one hand, the blue max, and on the other, Spotlight. The first movie details with preserving the public trust in the German army at the end of World War I, even though the officer corps is corrupt enough to kill one of its lieutenants in order to maintain the illusion of trustworthiness. The other is a movie about how the church decided to keep its people from knowing the truth about priests and child abuse, and that keeping them knowing, keeping them from knowing would ultimately be best for the people involved. Preserving faith, keeping things going, even at the price of shaving the truth, becomes the energy of this type of society. Needless to say, these are not the recipes for success, at least not in our world. When bribery and corruption and graft and influence become tolerated and then accepted, then every part of society changes and for the worse. Think of the hearings involved when the Challenger explosion had taken place. A number of people had given testimony about the problems that they had had with the booster rockets and how they had tried to communicate with NASA about all their concerns, only to be met with indifference and obfuscation. Eventually, the testimony came down to whether a particular seal on one of the booster rockets would work when it got cold. Failure of this item is what probably caused the crash and led to the death of the astronauts. But it seemed to be hard to get anyone to provide a definite decision about the issue. Nobody seemed to be willing to accept responsibility or to admit that they may have made a mistake. Eventually, at the hearing, one of the members took a sample of the seal and placed it in his glass of ice water and then bent it, whereupon it broke. You mean it might fail like this? He asked. That kind of honesty is the beginning of what it takes to solve problems and to make things work, even when the cost is embarrassment and awkwardness. And this is the great challenge lying ahead in our contemporary awareness. As the stories develop, we're all faced with the question of what to do. Fortunately, the incidents being reported are not part of the story of our environment here and now. But the challenges of what this means, they touch all of us. There seems to have been a quiet tolerance on the part of just about every part of society to ignore or even actively facilitate whatever wrongdoing was taken place. Which means the story is very much larger than simply those people who made money by cheating. It seems, at least at the level of reporting now, the whole infrastructure of checks and balances in the system was compromised and then failed. It would seem there needed to be a whole lot of ice water proofing that needs to happen if things are really going to get better. The lesson is kind of frightening. If it happened in one place, it could certainly happen in another. That's what we have to be wary of and learn from. Our world is interconnected. We don't have the luxury of imagining such things are only over there, far away from us. Of course, the more pervasive the cheating and fraud prove to be, the more difficult it will be to change the culture of wrongdoing that has developed. Even when the enforcement arms become involved and the work of justice is initiated, their reach will be limited. If there are hundreds or even thousands of cases, there'll be no way to enforce the law for everyone. Painfully, it might be the case that at most there could be a few high-profile persecutions and then perhaps just a warning for all the rest. Which, let's face it, is like leaving part of a cancerous tumor behind during a surgery. There's also the suspicion that those who have benefited most will be the ones least likely to be held accountable. That's not an accusation about political affiliation. It's just a norm when it comes to systemic faults. If the system isn't fixed, the faces may change while the problems remain the same. If this is the case, then more than simply the money stolen, the trust eroded. Becomes the price exacted in these situations. After a while, in the face of such widespread wrongdoing, everyone's tempted to cut corners or ignore the right thing. Especially if doing right is difficult and limiting, as we know it almost always is. In the Book of Wisdom, the admonition is not simply to ignore a bribe, but to literally but to brush one hand brush one's hands free of a bribe. That is to say, there has to be an active effort to stay away from the compromises and corruption of giving way to money and power. A man has to push away the bribe, not just not take it. Because corruption ruins everything. It's not enough to boast about not having been affected by it. The culture has to react against it. And while every part of what happened has to be thoroughly analyzed and then changed to keep it from happening again, even that's not enough. Active, energetic reactions to the situation of compromise and corruption have to be enacted by everyone. If the culture of sly double dealing is allowed to flourish, even if the major perpetrators are caught, there will be more and more to deal with in the future. We are political animals. This is inescapable because we live in a society, the polis of politics is our home. Thus, every decision and aspect of our lives are each determined by political means. Our relationship to God is also a part of our lives together. Systems that provide for a good life and good functioning promote and further the beauty of creation. When honesty, good order, and the right distribution of resources to the appropriate places are promoted, then life becomes a blessing for all. When the opposite of this happens, or these goods are perverted, then life becomes a curse. All of us are challenged to make life good for everyone by our participation in the good for everyone. The culture of good is a culture. Cultures grow and change by what we decide and what we do. We have to make sure we promote the culture of truth and responsibility in everything we do. Back in just a moment. At least it seems so as events unfurl and are whipped about in ceaseless gale. All slithers into corners to bend and curl as each report is filled and each person fails. In the sum of the distractions now raging, our confident solidity melts into thin air. With each revelation lurid and engaging, there is power to strip every notion thin and bare. Until we call to mind, remember as we must, where is to be found all that is solid and secure? Where is the firmest hope nested in this fuss that will maintain us all and then endure? It lies in the one who came to set us free from the flashes of today and the darkness of night, promising that in him on bended knee we can hope in steady promise and enduring right. That's the news. And that's a tall order, which is why our life together, as we continue to analyze and understand who we are, is the invitation to enter more deeply into the presence of Christ promised to us.

SPEAKER_01: 24:39

Living Catholic is a production of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City for Oklahoma Catholic Radio. To learn more, visit okr.org.