Living Catholic with Monsignor Don Wolf

Following All Saints Day and All Souls Day, Msgr. Don Wolf takes up exploring the Church's teaching on purgatory and argues it describes how we live, not just how we die. He builds the episode around Charles Williams’ novel "All Hallows’ Eve," whose two dead characters walk a journey of painful self-understanding, and around a man who spent decades resenting parents he had misjudged. Purgatory is an experience rather than a place, he says — not God making sure you've "suffered enough," but the searing work of being fully forgiven. 

Quoting Flannery O’Connor: love burns. 

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Monsignor 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.

In this episode,  Msgr. Don Wolf walks through the three major days of remembrance for the Church and argues that laughing at the monstrous is how we put evil in its place — the devil hates being laughed at. He turns to All Souls and the Day of the Dead, prompted by a skeleton in a mariachi hat on a south Oklahoma City cemetery fence, and asks why Americans have lost their connection to the dead. His answers are our rootlessness and the Protestant rejection of purgatory. He closes with Father Joe Kolb’s skull and its inscription: "What you are, I was. What I am, you will be."

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Monsignor 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.

In this episode, Msgr. Don Wolf makes the case that the Liturgy of the Word is not a warm-up for the Eucharist but half of the encounter itself. He traces the creative power of words from Genesis, where God speaks and it becomes so, to the ordinary moment when saying “I love you” brings something into being that wasn’t there before. Along the way he tells about a mega-church sermon that ran 35 minutes without touching the reading it followed, and about the eight-hour ordination of Cotton Mather, a caution that preaching long is not the same as preaching well. 

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Monsignor 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.

In this episode, Msgr. Don Wolf marks the beatification of Blessed Fulton Sheen by asking what we’re really after when we look at a holy life. He tells about a student who insisted Blessed Stanley Rother’s body was incorrupt and his grave smelled of roses — none of it true. He traces how each age picks its heroes, from Homer’s warriors to Superman, and our habit of cutting Jefferson, Lincoln and Eisenhower down to size. He closes on what canonization actually asks about a life, with Edith Stein and Mother Teresa as examples. 

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Monsignor 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.

If you’ve ever wondered what makes the Church more than a local gathering with a good message, apostolicity is the missing piece. In this episode, Monsignor Wolf walks through why the Church’s claim to be founded by Christ has to be rooted in the apostles, the first witnesses entrusted with Jesus’ mission, teaching and authority. When that connection is severed, Christianity can start to drift, until faith becomes whatever our era finds convenient.

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Monsignor 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.

Church today can feel like a personal preference, one more choice on a long list, like picking a flavor in the ice cream aisle. In this episode, Monsignor Wolf pushes back on that idea and asks a sharper question: what if “Catholic” is not a brand name at all, but the defining mark of what the Church is meant to be?

“Universal” is part of the definition, but go beyond geography to talk about purpose, unity, and the startling claim that the whole Church is truly present in every local Church. Whether you enter a shrine in Oklahoma or walk into St. Peter’s Basilica, you step into the same life of grace, the same Mass, and the same saving mission of Jesus Christ.

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Monsignor 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.

Holiness is not a personality type for a few intense people. It is what human beings are made for, and it is the reason the Church exists at all. In this episode, Monsignor Wolf explores the second of the four marks of the Church: Holy.

Modern spirituality often assumes the Church is optional, that we can piece together a private path to God, and that the sacraments are nice but not necessary. Monsignor Wolf pushes back using the New Testament itself, especially Saul’s conversion. Saul encounters Christ on the road, but it is Ananias who brings him into the community and into baptism, the moment that completes the turn toward becoming Paul the Apostle. 

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Monsignor 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.

Three churches on the same intersection can feel normal in modern America, but it should also make us pause. If Jesus is Lord with one Gospel, what does it mean when Christianity looks like a strip mall of options? 

In this episode, Monsignor Wolf wrestles with the practical question behind all those signs: what is the Church supposed to be, and how do we explain what makes the Catholic Church distinct without falling into slogans or tribalism?

Where do you see the need for Christian unity most clearly?

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Monsignor 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.

In this episode, Monsignor Wolf wrestles with the question: what did the 1960s do to us, and what do we do with that legacy now?

A retired bishop’s first novel, Behind Closed Doors by Francis Anthony Quinn, becomes a small but revealing window into seminary life, priestly formation, and the changing atmosphere of the Church from the 1940s and 1950s into the era we call “the sixties.” 

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Monsignor 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.

The hottest Catholic arguments love big labels: Latin Mass, Vatican II, governance, schism. But I’ve been wondering something simpler and harder to tweet about: what did those years actually feel like for regular people sitting in the pews and serving at the altar? 

In this episode, I share memories of becoming an altar server right as the prayers began moving from Latin to English, and why that shift wasn’t about “winning” a debate but about suddenly understanding every word and feeling the weight of getting it right. 

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Monsignor 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.