Father Don Wolf:
Priesthood Offers True Bargain

EDITOR'S NOTE: Our series celebrating the different ways in which Oklahoma Catholics heard and answered the call to serve the Church continues during the Centennial year of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City.

By Father Don Wolf

Not long ago I went to visit in the hospital. I came up on the principle floor to see a long- time parishioner. He had been growing worse and on that day his condition was perilous.

His family was there to visit him, including his children and grandchildren, his in-laws, god- children and some of his cousins. As I came into the room his wife asked if I might celebrate the sacrament of the sick for him. So I took out my ritual book, put on my stole, opened the container of oil and invited the people in the room to pray with me. As I came to the part of the rite where I was to lay hands on him I reached out and put my hands on his head. His wife also reached up and put her hands on mine. When she did this the rest of the people in the room surged forward and placed their hands on him as well. Those in the back who couldn’t reach the bed put their hands, in turn, on the shoulders of those closest to him until there were nearly 30 people linked in a chain of prayer, their hope for healing and forgiveness bonded to mine. At that moment I knew, once again, why I became a priest.

Priests are the transit point for a life of grace in the Church; we’re there to hold the gate open for others. We talk about the power that a priest has or the change that comes upon him when he’s ordained, a change that allows him to give so much to others. But the truth is that being a priest is also marked by what he receives. That has been the case for me. I have received more than I’ve given away.

I didn’t know any of this when I first started thinking about the seminary. That took place during my second year at OSU. I had gone there to study Aeronautical Engineering in 1973 and only wanted to learn how to design airplanes and find a future for myself. Part of my journey into the future was becoming involved with Saint John’s student chapel in Stillwater. It was my involvement there that led me to begin thinking that my life might have more than engineering in its future.

I was raised in South Oklahoma City on a farm. My parents and my brothers and sisters and I were part of a great web of family that stretched from Oklahoma City to Okarche and beyond. Part of this web in which I was raised was life in the church. We all went to Mass on Sunday, to Stations of the Cross during Lent, to all of the Holy Week services.

Like all of my cousins and the rest of my brothers I became an altar boy when I was old enough and I signed on to be a lector when that became available. It was a time when our family connections were intact and the practice of the faith was almost unconsciously present among us. We didn’t think of ourselves as religious; we just thought that we were Catholic. In our life in the faith we thought we were doing only what Catholics do, nothing more.

With this background, however, I never considered becoming a priest before I was in college. In my childhood two of my distant cousins were ordained to the priesthood, one from my father’s side of the family, Jim Koelsch, and one from my mother’s side of the family, Stanley Rother. But I didn’t see much of them when I was growing up. Just knowing there were priests in the family wasn’t enough to ever tempt me to think in that direction.

But when I got to OSU things changed. Going to Stillwater led me to Father Bob Schlitt who had arrived there that same year. Father Bob was an extraordinary character. He was the first priest I had ever really gotten to know one-on-one. He was kind and caring and seemed very priestly in a traditional way. But every part of his personality communicated that his life as a priest was important to him and to us. He is the one person who most directly contributed to my decision to become a priest. A few weeks into the first semester I started going to the Student Center at Saint John’s regularly. I became involved there because it was a chance to make the faith I had received from my family something that was my own. At first I went because what went on there was important to me. By the second semester of my second year in school it had become the only important thing to me. That’s when I decided I needed to go to the seminary.

It occurred to me, one day in March at Sunday Mass. Along with this jolting revelation I also knew that if didn’t go I would regret it for the rest of my life. So in April of 1975, just after the Holy Saturday Vigil Mass, I rang the doorbell to Father Bob’s rectory to tell him that I thought God was calling me to be a priest. There were some sticky complications of getting out of an ROTC scholarship and saying goodbye to my girlfriend, but once decided the circumstances seemed hardly to matter. I was at Saint Meinrad Seminary that next August. It was the best thing that ever happened to me.

One greatest blessing stands out; it set the course for the rest of my life. At that time the seminary at Saint Meinrad offered an option of studying for a semester at the Mexican

American Cultural Center in San Antonio. It sounded like a good opportunity so I enrolled. Because of this I began to understand the needs of the recent immigrants from Mexico. But more importantly, I was given a chance to experience a completely different part of the world. By becoming equipped to work with those in the Mexican community my direction for the priesthood was set. When I graduated from the seminary it was with another language as well as with a diploma. There is a saying that when you learn another language you receive another soul. I was given a new soul at the seminary.

From Saint Meinrad I went to the Oklahoma Panhandle to begin my ministry. During my 24 years as a priest I have also been in Southwest Oklahoma, Oklahoma City, Chicago for a time as president of the National Federation of Priests’ Councils and now Duncan. During all of this time my ministry has included the Spanish-speaking, although it has always included parish ministry with the English-speaking as well.

The life of a parish priest is often complicated. Part of that complication is because priesthood is based on receiving so much from so many. There are the blessings that come from opening the doorway of healing to a dying man. There are the difficulties that come from being a lightning rod for other people’s anger. There are the challenges of receiving the great intimacies of people who long to bare their souls. But priesthood is a particularly intense version of every Christian’s life, including the complications. And as a Christian life priesthood has been a blessing for me.

A little over 20 years ago I was in the Oklahoma Panhandle. Part of my ministry was to go out to the feedlots and say Mass for the families who couldn’t make it into town on Sundays. On one June evening I stood in the common room of the single-men’s barracks at the feedlot, saying the concluding Mass prayers. Just after the final blessing the people gathered there formed a circle around the folding table we used as an altar. Linking hands they sang a verse of las mananitas and then offered an extra prayer. In their prayer they wished me a happy Father’s Day. That was when I knew what it was like to be a priest. It was a day when they asked only that I receive all of them in the same way each of them had received me. They told me, in essence, I could receive much more than I had been given. It seemed like a bargain.