We Went Outside to Pray and Accidentally Learned Ecclesiology | March 1, 2026

What if the loudest place in town is the best place to learn how to pray? In this episode we will talk about the Living Stations of the Cross at the Blessed Stanley Rother Shrine in Oklahoma City—a crowd shouting, a cross moving, voices cracking—and follow that energy into a bigger question: how does faith change when it steps outside and faces the street? From there, we trace a living thread through Church history, where stalls along a Roman road became sanctuaries, prayer was spoken for all to hear, and stained glass dressed Scripture in the clothes and cities of its makers so salvation felt near, not archived.

Joining the crowd reveals our place in the Passion, and acting the story teaches what reflection alone cannot. Along the way, Augustine’s surprise at Ambrose reading silently becomes a window into the rise of interior privacy—and how modern habits can fence faith indoors. We talk about monasteries that formed charity by sharing work, prayer, and even sleep; seminaries that reintroduced roommates to recover the muscle of common life; and processions and Holy Week traditions that knit strangers into a people. 

We also face the pitfalls. Public religion can turn hollow, just as private piety can grow stale. The remedy is union. Lent invites us to bring our bodies into the story: to read the Passion and then walk it, to pray with our hands as much as our minds, to place acts of mercy where the city can see, and to let shared practices at home—meals, prayers, apologies—turn interiors into common ground.

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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.

Transcript

Setting The Scene For Lent

SPEAKER_01 0:04

This is living Catholic faith with Father Donald.

Good Friday As Lived Prayer

Joining The Crowd And Finding Place

Faith As Public Performance

Early Christian Worship Faced The Street

Reading Aloud And Public Interior Life

Medieval Immediacy In Stained Glass

Belonging In Public Devotion

Privacy, Homes, And Shared Lives

Cultural Gaps And Teaching Missteps

Community Life In Monastic And Seminary

Catholic Identity Beyond Interiors

The Peril Of Purely Private Piety

Our Discomfort With External Prayer

SPEAKER_00 0:19

Welcome, Oklahoma, to Living Catholic. I'm Monsignor Don Wolfe, pastor of Sacred Heart Parish, and rector of the shrine of Blessed Stanley Rother. As I sit and prepare this program, I can hear the participants of this year's Living Stations of the Cross practicing in the parking lot. Lent has barely begun, and already they're getting ready for its culmination on Good Friday. I can hear them shouting the voices of the crowd as Jesus is condemned, and hear the wailing of the women crying as he walks the way of the cross. It's about as poignant a preparation for this penitential season as anyone could imagine. Shouts riding from the pavement might seem to be a maudlin way to begin this church's season. We're supposed to be more positive and grace-filled as we lean into these forty days of penance and repentance. But the rising volume on this day is a good reminder that the real Good Friday was not about ideas and insights gained from meditation and contemplation. It was a moment of noise, sweat, blood, insults, and shouts. And Lent is more than casting our mind in the right direction. It's a time in which we act to make our days different and our time fruitful in all, and all of that by what we do. Looking forward to Good Friday is actually a pretty good way to keep our vision clear. Over the last several years, our Good Friday celebration has garnered lots of attention. By now we have thousands who show up and walk the stations with us. Ironically, there's a greater and greater number of English-speaking who join us for the stations, although all of the readings and songs are in Spanish. But of course, the drama of the story and the passion of the participants make for the depth of the prayer there. And as I tell everyone, we've all read the book. We know the story pretty well, even if it's told then in a language we might not speak. Each year I've been overwhelmed by how powerful the prayer becomes as we gather together and walk the journey of Jesus' suffering and death. It's no wonder participation in it continues to grow. And there is, of course, the glamour of being able to dress in the costumes we have, as well as the attraction of being one of the characters in this living presentation. It's no secret we adults like to play dress up. It's all the more fun when the occasion is something notable, like our living stations. It adds a kind of immediacy to the story that we don't get when we're hearing it. When we're part of the crowd yelling, crucify him, or when we cry for Barabbas instead of Jesus outside Pilate's court. There's an energy there, a sort of animation that just doesn't happen when we're reading the story passively. We have a part in what's being acted out in the open. Even those of us who merely attend, we're drawn into the action and stand as participants in what's going on. Or a better way to say it, we have a place. That's what we're trying to celebrate when we're there. In Jesus' trial and suffering all through the stations of the cross, we have a place. The living stations are not are certainly not unique to us. Indeed, one of the stories of the development of Christianity has been the public expression of faith and teaching that has accompanied it has accompanied it from the beginning. The faith of our ancestors was performative, not passive. They lived the life of the faith as they lived the rest of their lives outdoors. It was only normal they seized on the great moments of Christian belief to express their faith and to teach others about it, which they did in the open. They wouldn't have understood why we'd up why we would append the adjective living to the stations of the cross, acting out what they believed and entering into the performance of the gospel stories would simply have been the norm for them in every way. Recently, I described visiting the Basilica of Narius and Achilles in Rome during my sabbatical year in 2021. In the crypt of that church are the remains of the Roman street where the first chapel in the area was built. The pastor of the parish told us that it began as a simple stall where businesses and where businessmen and tradesmen operated along the street. It wasn't much more than a table, surrounded by a couple of benches, fenced off from the other stalls with palms or blankets. Later, the stalls were divided by brick and mortar. And still later they were covered with roofs that made in that made it into a kind of room with one side open on the street. The point he made was that the worship area had begun as an open area. It was an open area gathering spot where the prayers could be offered and people could talk. It was public, and not just open to the public, as if it were a kind of reading room a person could enter. It faced onto the street. It was part of the traffic on the road, just as every other shop was. Life in the city was public and shared, communal, explicit and noisy. And every aspect of life was lived in just that manner. Privacy, including the privacy of thought and the disposition of a person's interior, was something that developed only much later. The church and the life of the faith was lived as every part of society was lived, out in the open. And we should recall that this extended even to what we would imagine to be the prerequisites of a regular life. In his confessions, St. Augustine mentioned that he used to stay with St. Ambrose, his great mentor and catechist bishop of Milan, who shepherded him into the faith. Augustine was an accomplished academic at this point and had spent years honing his skills as a public intellectual and man of letters. Ambrose was also notable as an administrator and preacher, someone of note and a man of gravity. But while staying with him, Augustine came across Ambrose in his room one afternoon reading a book. And what floored Augustine was that Ambrose read simply by looking at the book. He didn't read out loud, which was the first time Augustine had ever seen anyone doing that. Reading was a public action, shared with whomever was in earshot. For the first time in his life, Augustine realized there was an option for privacy of thought, a space in the interior, not crowded into by the public action of another. It's hard for us to imagine, but silence in the library was something Augustine couldn't imagine. Indeed, silence anywhere would have been hard to imagine in the fourth century. But our ancestors, in the interweaving of their lives in the living public sphere, wove their faith from the same cloth. They did not simply grasp ideas and hold on to them. And they certainly did not content themselves with private affirmations. They were boldly and wholly public, not the least because there was no other way to be. This public aspect also contributed to the immediacy of the faith. This is hard to describe for all of us who've grown up in the age of history where we regard the past as a discrete world separated from our own by the peculiarities of the past and the uniqueness of our age. But it was not always so in the world of our ancestors, who lived their faith in the outdoor present, where every part of life was lived within the confines of the community. The best way to appreciate this sense of immediacy is to note that the stained glass windows, prominent in the great cathedrals of Europe in the 14th century, contained the images from that time. The images there, which were scenes from the Bible and of the great saints from the Old and the New Testaments, are made from the era of the people making the stained glass. The people wear the dress of the 14th century, women wrap their hair and men wear tunics, kings have crowns and their queens are sheathed in damask and silk. Arms and armor of the soldiers are from the style and strategy of the Middle Ages. And the scenery is of walled cities, of castles and fortresses, of the trees and the plants of northern Europe. The people put in their stained glass what they imagined the drama of the gospels they read. Their story was simple. The stories they read were happening among them, not in a place strange and different and among people from long ago. They knew Jerusalem wasn't Paris and that Bethphage wasn't Poitiers, but in their imagination, these places were versions of what they saw and knew of their life at the moment. They inhabited a world in which the Good Samaritan was a scene they knew. The woman caught in adultery had a neighbor's face. And the rich man who walked past Lazarus was someone everyone recognized. They lived their faith amid the familiar and the known. There wasn't a distance between the word on the page and the drama of living. It was all one and it took up residence in their lives. That's the kind of energy we like to see. It seems so foreign to us, both because of our historical sensibilities. We know the world of Galilee and Jerusalem and its historical epoch was a different place than the world we live in now. And it's foreign to us because of our banishment of public belief. When we do have the moments to see and participate in these little dramas, they really speak to us of what we know in our bones. We belong inside of a world in which the inner and outer speak to one another, in which the public and the private intersect. So, for example, when we go to a place like Guatemala for Holy Week, and we see the great presentations involving hundreds of people in the great public dramas they celebrate, we're moved as much by the passion and involvement of the people as by the simple spectacle of the thing. Those who are there belong there. And that's what we want and what our hearts are for, to belong there. What this does for the life of the faith is something we have a hard time coming to understand in our world, in which the public and private spheres are notions we seldom can imagine as being different than they are now. They are separate and are walled off from each other so that they seldom intermix at all. Our age is a place in which privacy is presumed, and our public face is something to be managed and curated. Public expressions are something scripted and controlled, an aspect of life removed from the expectations of everyday life, something held out for special times or major moments. Unlike in the days of the past, we don't live facing the street. We live behind closed doors. And the contrasts show themselves in the most obvious places. I grew up on a farm miles away from the nearest neighbor, but our house was small and our family substantially large. And what that meant was that we lived our lives alongside everyone else. There wasn't any room for private behavior apart from what everyone else could hear or be a part of. Like most of humanity during most of history, my life was lived in public, even if it was restricted to the public eyes of my family. I was recalling my youth with an acquaintance of mine several years ago when I and when I talked about growing up, I mentioned that before my mother died, she died when I was 16, had only I had only had two private conversations with her. And when I said that, he thought it meant I never spoke to her. But that wasn't the point we talked all the time. It's that in a small house, all conversations are public ones, with no expectation of privacy or confidentiality. If there are secrets to keep, allies have to be recruited since the whole family knows what's going on. If there are corrections to be made or apologies to be offered, everyone else is a part of them too. Even wandering off alone was no option. On a farm, there's too much to do simply to walk away. Everyone would take notice because everyone notices everything. We lived our lives in public, or at least among the public inside our house. There wasn't any other option. The nature of life begins to look different when what we expect of privacy and aloneness and interiority isn't matched by the realities of society different than our own. This was brought home to me in a humorous response that Father Tom McSherry gave when talking to a group of sisters who had come to visit him in Guatemala. These American sisters were working in Guatemala, and they had developed a plan for comprehensive sex education that they wanted to share with the people of the parishes there. Their experience had mostly been in parishes in the larger cities, and they wanted to take their lessons to the small towns and the underdeveloped areas in the countryside where it was needed the most. Coming to Santiago Atitlan, they spoke with Father McSherry about their plans. When they finished their presentation, including their course outline, they wanted to know what the pastor thought. And Father Tom began by saying, I'm not sure this is exactly what the people need here. Most of them, you know, were in the same room when their brothers and sisters were conceived. I'm not sure your pres your presumptions are the same as their reality. Life in Santiago, especially at that time, was one in which a family lived in one room, a place where they prepared their meals, where everyone ate, and where everyone slept. And the houses were next to each other, chock a block with all of the other houses in the neighborhood. Life was lived in the mostly overtly public way anyone could imagine. The lessons didn't take this public part of life into consideration. Eventually the sisters did come to the parish with their presentations, but things didn't go well. They didn't connect well with the people there. That public nature of life has its effect in institutional life as well. And as in private life, we often forget its influence. When Saint Benedict began to describe the new community of Christian life he was forming in his monasteries, he put a premium on the communal life that the monks shared together. They gathered to work and to pray together to support one another as they sought the kingdom of God together. And as part of this arrangement at the beginning, they also slept all in the same room together. I'm sure they would have been surprised by any other arrangement that would have been considered. They'd come from a communal world in which family life was all together. A community of brothers seeking the kingdom would have been the same. And not just in monasteries and not just a thousand years ago. When I first went to the seminary, the dorms were full, so I was assigned to a room with three roommates. My second year, I had two roommates. My third year, just one. It wasn't a deliberate policy. It was simply the fact of the sociology of the time. There wasn't enough rooms for all of us who were in school, so we roomed together. And I didn't mind. My brothers and I had slept in the same room, and indeed, about half of that time we all slept in the same bed up to that point. I don't remember being troubled for one moment about having three other guys in one room with me. Privacy was not a habit I had acquired. When my nephew went to the seminary a little over ten years ago, there was plenty of room, and yet the school required all of the freshmen to have roommates. There were enough rooms to go around for everybody. They just wanted each student to have the experience of what it's like to live a communal life. One lived with somebody directly and immediately. This was prompted by the discovery that most of the young men coming to the seminary had never not had their own room when growing up. The seminary thought it important to give everyone the experience that had been common for seminarians in the past, the challenge of living with someone else in close quarters. Those involved in spiritual formation thought it valuable and necessary that these young men have an experience of living in public, even if it were no more than the public of one other person. This experiment proved to be valuable in getting the guys to understand something of themselves in the community they had become a part of. On a day-to-day level, they had to learn to make way for another and to consider the needs of the whole over the individual. This outside experience of the life of the faith also makes it mark on personal identification and value. For our ancestors, to be a part of the church was to be woven into the public, expressive life of the faithful in all the ways that this was lived and celebrated. Rather than an interior disposition or a personal ascent, faith was a current carrying the believer onward into the future in every aspect of life. To be a Catholic was to be a part of the Catholic world, not just to mark RC in the square next to denomination. And that world was whole and full in every way. It could be shallow and facile, certainly. There was nothing easier than going through the motions and playing up the drama of belief, while the whole rest of life remained untouched by the heart of faith and purpose. There's nothing easier than putting on a costume for a little while and acting the part given to you in the small drama, say of Good Friday. It's easy to focus on a festival of the Passion Story or maybe the Christmas program. It's a lot harder to make the gospel a living part of your life, guiding and directing your thoughts and actions. Everyone remembers the scenes in the movie Godfather II, in which the mafioso stroll through the street while the great carnival is going on with processions and statues and fireworks and food and kids and grandmas and everything else happening all over. The mafioso makes a gesture of giving money to the statue of Mary and blows a kiss at her, all overt and public gestures that go along with all of the hoopla of the moment. And we know, watching, it's mostly false. At least the gestures don't match what we've come to know of this man and what his life is like. Of course, the next godfather and the one after him don't go for such noisy Sicilian fun, and they're not any better or more sincere in what they believe or do. The first of the mafiosi may be shallow and hypocritical, but not more so than those who follow him. It's our temptation to move every part of the life of faith to an interior experience. The ideas we have, the convictions we assent to, the loyalties we ally with, all of these define us and what we're about, but all of them are imagined by us to happen solely between our ears. Our faith is shaped by these presumptions, and they're lived in the same way. Our faith is cast in us to be lived inside. Our most popular versions of piety and devotion are tilted to the interior. We're preoccupied mostly about thinking and talking, and not so much about acting and doing. For example, on the internet recently there has been a fury of exchanges by people who are anxious that when people are at mass, they should never ever raise their hands at the Aura Father. In their opinion, such things such a thing is feboen, unforstellbar, impossible, and downright bad. People shouldn't raise their hands and do anything except stand still and pray the prayer, you know, like people should. And there are all kinds of reasons given, the biggest one being that those who raise their hands are doing so in imitation of the priest. And since those in the pews aren't priests, they shouldn't pray like this. That reason always seems strange to me, since most of the people I knew who chose to pray that way were imitating the charismatics who pray every prayer that way, following the recommendations in the Psalms. But folks see what they see. The truth is, as a people, we're uncomfortable with the external. It bugs us to see something different or some action that looks strange. We want things to be calm and controlled and regular and prescribed, you know, not like outdoors. Maybe that's why we're all so bad at processions. We just can't get used to the freedom of being beyond four walls. We presume every part of life ought to be first inscribed on the interior. Only later, only later might it have a place outside. But only as a sort of premium, not as something integral or important. External for us is secondary to the internal. That's how we live our lives of faith. But we could learn a lot from entering into the living stations of the cross and have some experience of what our ancestors knew. They were no slouches when it came to creating a living faith with the power to communicate across the ages and touch the deepest parts of the soul. It would appear, given the history we're a part of, they knew what they were doing when they lived their faith out in the open for the whole world to see. It's not the only measure, but it certainly is one that counts to live. Live in the open for the world to know and measure and take stock and to take stock of. We're proud to note that it's what's in a man's heart that is the true measure, not what accumulates on the outside. We count the real and the certain in terms of conviction and confession, not costumes and comedy. But in a world where the inside and the outside meet, there wouldn't be any distance between these extremes. Belief and beauty, depth and dance would all be lived together. And that sounds like the world I'd like to be in. Back in just a moment. Welcome back to our final segment, Faith in Verse. We have a poem today called What Do We Say? What do we say when we say goodbye at our last moments with the ones we love? We stumble, our words hiccuped as we cry, words worthy of inspiration from above. But what can we summon at that moment to say to the one now departing? Pearls of hope, prayers, a wisdom heaven sent, our baubles tumbled out to them imparting. We want a final denouement, the end, in which all is summed and given and said, Passionately enough even the soul could bend and make up for us where our faults had led. But it may be we have no leverage there. In those moments when final breaths are taken, all the doing has been done, full and fair, so thoughts of new or change lie forsaken. The words to be spoken to our loved one are to be whispered now, here and today, before the contours of life are leveled and done, and we're left only to look and pray. That's what do we say.

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.