Living Catholic with Monsignor Don Wolf

A life can turn on a single promise, and you rarely understand it on the day you make it. Monsignor Don Wolf looks back to 1981, when he was ordained a Catholic priest at Our Lady’s Cathedral in Oklahoma City, then walks forward through 45 years of priesthood with the kind of detail only memory and gratitude can sharpen: a hot, humid day, a cranky air conditioner, and the strange feeling of realizing how fast decades pass.

************

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.

Memorial Day can feel like a switch flips and suddenly it’s summer, but we don’t want the holiday to become just another weekend that disappears into the blur. In this episode, we talk about the pace of time and the quiet danger of sleepwalking through our days, when everything is “busy” yet almost nothing is remembered. If we don’t pause on purpose, the moments that should shape us can slide into forgetfulness, and we end up losing not just details, but meaning.

************

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.

Someone stands up in a pulpit and says the quiet part out loud: parts of the Bible are “problematic,” so maybe we should rip those pages out and replace them with a brand-new “Third Testament.” The backlash makes sense, but we don’t want to stop at outrage. We want to ask the harder question: what are the Scriptures, and how are we supposed to read them when a passage feels confusing, offensive, or simply impossible to square with modern instincts?

Our conclusion is simple and challenging: the “Third Testament” people want already exists. It’s the Church, with her living tradition and authority to guide biblical interpretation so the Word of God becomes a gift we can actually receive. 

************

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.

Someone says the quiet part out loud: what if we just rip out the Bible passages that bother us? A pastor in Oakland suggests removing “problem” pages and even adding a third testament, and the internet predictably erupts. We slow the whole thing down and ask what’s actually at stake when Christians treat scripture as disposable, outdated, or only selectively “God’s Word.”

In this episode, we talk about why certain lines hit modern listeners like a slap, including texts tied to slavery and the treatment of women, and we don’t pretend those reactions are irrational. We also explore a growing pastoral reality: some communities reshape how scripture is proclaimed in worship because phrases like “The word of the Lord” or even lifting the book can feel weaponized to people carrying real trauma. Sensitivity matters, but so does the question underneath it: if the Bible is not God speaking to his people, then who decides what remains, what gets reinterpreted and what gets tossed?

************

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.

Funerals are quietly disappearing, and I do not think we realize what we are trading away. More and more, families tell us there will be no services at all, or we learn someone has already been buried with no prayer, no gathering, no public mourning. That choice is not just about preference. It exposes what we believe about the human person, what we think death means, and whether faith is still strong enough to bring us to the grave together.

In this episode, I walk through why funerals have always mattered, even before Christianity, and why the Catholic funeral liturgy matters in a distinct way. At a Catholic funeral we proclaim the resurrection, we place our trust in Christ, and we pray for the forgiveness and mercy the dead still need. That is also why we do not turn the rite into a staged tribute or a “celebration of life” that only highlights accomplishments. When we edit the truth to protect comfort, grief becomes awkward, hope becomes thin, and we end up praising the dead instead of praying for them.

************

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.

Prayer can feel like it should be simple, but many of us quietly experience it as awkward, distracting, or even discouraging. In this episode, we tackle the question: why is prayer so hard? 

We reflect on how naturally human beings communicate, then trace why communion with God can feel less natural than we expect. The Christian story of Eden points to an original harmony of heart and mind, while everyday life reveals how fractured our interior world can be. We talk about God’s word in Scripture, the ways God can speak beyond words, and why so many of us struggle to access the “territory of the heart” where that listening often happens. 

We also offer a grounded path forward: patience, perseverance, and the humility to stop performing prayer and start living it as a two-way exchange. The duck gliding across the pond while paddling hard underneath becomes a map for spiritual growth, reminding us that steady progress is often invisible. 

************

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.

Nobody walks to the tomb expecting a new world. In this episode, that’s where we start: with the disciples’ honest assumption that Jesus is gone for good, and with the uncomfortable way that grief trains all of us to think death, defeat, and shame are permanent.

We talk through why the Resurrection of Jesus isn’t just a first-century mystery but a living Catholic claim that reorders how reality works. The irony is sharp: the chief priests are the ones who remember Jesus said He would rise, and their fear turns into a strange kind of witness. From there we sit with the disciples’ puzzlement as they struggle to recognize the risen Lord, including a reflection on the Shroud of Turin and the face cloth detail in John’s Gospel as a way to think about signs, belief, and the gap between “something happened” and “I have met Him.”

The heart of the episode is what Easter does to suffering. Jesus appears in glory, yet His wounds remain, and that changes how we see our own scars. 

************

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, we start with Iran in the headlines and then pull the camera back to something smaller and more personal: an Iranian student in an Oklahoma high school, far from home, carrying a life we barely understood. That memory becomes a challenge to how we talk about conflict, national security, and “winning” while ordinary families on every side try to survive the day. 

From there, we face the fog of war and the uncomfortable truth that certainty often outpaces knowledge. Even the people closest to the action rarely see the whole picture, and fast media can amplify confidence without adding wisdom. We ask what a Catholic view of war requires from citizens and leaders: humility, moral clarity, and a willingness to question whether policies pursued in our name actually serve the common good. 

************

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.

Before sunrise, a group of women walks through a city controlled by Roman power, carrying spices and cloth for a burial they expect will be painful and final. They’re not looking for a miracle. They’re looking for a body. That simple, human mission becomes the doorway to one of the most disruptive claims in Christian faith: the tomb is open, the grave is empty, and the world is no longer limited by death.

In this episode, we reflect on how expectation shapes everything we do, how grief follows scripts we think we can trust, and why the first reaction to the empty tomb is confusion and suspicion rather than instant belief. In a Jerusalem tense with politics, fear, and the memory of a crucifixion, even a stolen body seems more “reasonable” than resurrection. But Easter does not arrive as an idea; it arrives as a fact that demands interpretation, and the women are entrusted with a message that reframes the impossible: Jesus is risen, and risen as he promised. 

************

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.

Jerusalem is packed for Passover, and it feels like the whole city is holding its breath. In this episode, we step into that tension on Palm Sunday, when Roman occupation, local religious leadership, and street-level resentment all collide with one name on everyone’s tongue: Jesus. From the first minutes, we follow the rising pressure of a place where whispers can become a revolt, and where every public gesture gets read as a political signal. 

We talk through why Jesus draws crowds so quickly: the blunt urgency of his preaching, the nearness of the kingdom of God, and the undeniable weight of his ministry in healings, deliverance, and wonder. 

************

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.