Living Catholic with Father Don Wolf
Father Don Wolf, a priest of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City, offers a Catholic perspective on the issues confronting each person today.
Living Catholic with Father Don Wolf
"When Death Comes for the Pope" | April 27, 2025
Pope Francis has died at age 88, following recent health challenges including respiratory infection complications made more difficult by his lifelong condition of having only one functioning lung. His papacy, which began when he was 76 years old, spanned 12 years of devoted service despite increasing physical limitations including severe mobility issues.
• Pope's death came on Easter Sunday night after greeting pilgrims from the papal balcony that afternoon
• Francis embodied the Jesuit charism of going to the margins, ministering at bus stations and addiction clinics
• Modern papacy marked by unprecedented media visibility, beginning with Pius XII and peaking with John Paul II
• All popes face criticism but Francis seemed to evoke particularly strong responses, both positive and negative
• Church has weathered far darker periods in its history with much more corrupt leadership
• The papal office continues despite challenges, with the Church enduring through centuries of change
We can say that all healing comes from the goodness of God written into the fabric of nature. As believers we know the wholeness of life is in Jesus Christ himself.
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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.
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 2:Welcome Oklahoma to Living Catholic. I'm Father Don Wolfe, pastor of the Shrine of Blessed Stanley Rother and Sacred Heart Parish, and, as we all know by now, pope Francis has died. By late last Monday afternoon, the news had penetrated to the deepest, most remote corners of the world that he had died on Easter Sunday night. Easter Monday morning, although he had been greeting pilgrims from the papal balcony on Easter Sunday afternoon, he succumbed in the evening or early morning. Following Catholics all over the world mourn his passing, this is not a great surprise to any of us. He was sick for the previous month and had a long hospital stay. He was 89 years old. He was 76 when he was elected to the papacy and had been in office for 12 years. All during these years he had kept a full schedule of activities and decision-making incumbent on him as leader of the church. This is even more notable since, even as a young man, he had suffered health challenges. His last sickness, in fact, was a great challenge to him. It involved a respiratory infection that he, since he, has lived with only one functioning lung most of his adult life. Amid his sickness, the Pope recovered. He credited his recovery at the time to the fervent prayers offered for his health and the sustaining good faith of the many people of the church who stormed heaven for his sake. While these things can never be quantified, it certainly is the case that they do matter. None of us can tell for sure whether any particular prayer or prayer rising from a sea of those who pray is the one that helped him. But we can say that all healing comes from the goodness of God written into the fabric of nature which includes us, and it certainly is the case that the Pope did recover for a time.
Speaker 2:The burden of leadership in the church is a crushing one. It's also one of enormous responsibility, which is why most of those elected to it are senior. In years Only they have accumulated the experience and the wisdom requisite to administer and lead the church with real acumen and actual wisdom. Given his advanced age, we shouldn't be too surprised to note that Pope Francis had difficulties with his health. Eighty-nine years is a remarkable achievement, especially for him, who had been sickly as a child and a young man. There's nothing out of the ordinary that this last bout of bronchitis and possible pneumonia laid him low, just as there was nothing out of the ordinary that a 76-year-old was elected to one of the most demanding jobs in the world. Francis followed in a long series of examples of those men who spent a lifetime in ministry and who were then elected to the highest office in the church. It's a place for those who have seen the world and have spent their lives serving the Lord's mission in it, which is why the health of a pope is a topic notable to all of us.
Speaker 2:We Catholics, of course, want to know how the leader of the church is getting along. All of us are invested in his decisions and his leadership. Every Catholic is in some way affected by what he does and how he exercises his office. But the rest of the world also knows he embodies the leadership of the church and is the living symbol of the Christian faith. Not every Christian recognizes him as a leader, but he is the leader of all that it means to be Christian, and in a world as profoundly religious as ours, who leads the Christian of the world? The Christians of the world really matters. Now.
Speaker 2:The joke has always been that the Vatican, in their clumsy Italian approach to publicity, always assures the world the Pope is perfectly fine, until he's died. This wasn't exactly the case with his last illness. We were apprised of the serious nature of his illness even while he was hospitalized. But even with the more updated and realistic reporting of his situation, we didn't really know how serious his condition was. I certainly was surprised when I heard of his passing Surprised, but not shocked.
Speaker 2:Every pope, after all, faces the truth of mortality, as does every person born into this world. The pictures we saw of the Pope showed a man much touched by the struggle to regain his health and battle the infection he suffered, and not just as a result of this last bout of sickness. Over the last five years or so, pope Francis has endured the pain of a bad hip that severely limited his mobility. When I was in Rome for my sabbatical in 2021, I had the opportunity to go to three papal audiences. As they progressed through the months I was there, he was slower and slower getting around on the stage of the audience hall. Eventually, he could move only by grasping his chair and then his podium, and it only became worse as time went on. In the last days, he was almost completely immobile. This additional challenge showed in his face and in the increased difficulty he had as he worked to get through his day. He looked very much like he was in his 90th year.
Speaker 2:In the world of pain and dying, we all participate Rank and office matter not a whit to the ultimate truth of the end of life. Death comes for us all, including for the vicar of Christ. As believers we know the wholeness of life is in Jesus Christ himself. Whilst Francis suffered the disabilities of sickness and difficulty and endured the challenges that limited his ability to carry out his work, he was also embodying the faith his office represents. Pain and suffering, anguish and difficulty, even doubt and uncertainty, are shared with Christ and are part of the saving work of Jesus in all of our lives. Such challenges are doubly the case for the most public face of Christianity in the world. Our prayers have always been not that the Pope live a hundred years, but that his life mirror in every way the life he shares with the life of Christ. Now that we know the closed parentheses of his time, we see that he has indeed shared it. Now that death has come for Francis, there will be another pope.
Speaker 2:Over the years, there's been much mythology that has gathered about the succession of popes in our age, with predictions made about how this pope or the next one or the one succeeding will be the last one. Prophecies and visions are invoked, all very powerfully describing, and require us to wonder if the gates of hell might indeed prevail against Jesus' church. At least there's a powerful presence on the internet invoking this possibility. Going from pope to pope, folks on social media ask us to consider whether the future of the church itself is on life support After all. How could things really get much worse?
Speaker 2:There's a riot of unbelief in the church's eldest sons. There's war and rumors of war, even on the plains of Europe. There are growing tensions among the powerful nations. There is the splintering of belief and practice among those who fill the churches. There's a restless Muslim world. There's the movement of millions across the borders on our maps and there's the facile disregard of life, so that the weakest and the most disenfranchised on the planet are tossed away as garbage or used as products for our various industries and universities. There's the destruction of the uniqueness of man and woman and the ultimate debasement of the most fundamental human characteristics. All of these are issues for today and tomorrow.
Speaker 2:There are those who feel that these challenges will overcome the papacy and hollow out the church, and they may do so, in that they are real, true challenges and are at odds with the life-giving message of the gospel. They're competitors to the office of the pope. For the pope to come and for all the ones to follow. Certainly, there are no shortage of moments in which the church is challenged to be the teacher and pastor of the people of the whole world, and there's no shortage of the times in which the church must pause and listen to the thunder of the currents running through the lives of its people, so as to know where we're being taken. The church is not a pristine reality standing apart from us. It is instantiated in us. We're to be given to Christ, but what's given is us in the world right now, in every way. Living in another day and time or responding to the needs of today only by invoking the answers of yesterday is not enough, because the church lives here and now, which means the air we breathe is the air of conflict, confusion, opposition and evil. We breathe is the air of conflict, confusion, opposition and evil. Being given to Christ is to be invested in his promises as we live here and now. It's frightening, but anyone who knows history knows there have been many dark days in the church, days much darker than these. A brief tour through, say, the 7th century or the 17th is enough to know that while we are challenged, we're not alone in the rough weave of this time. The church has weathered other times of catastrophe and confusion. It will weather this time. This next pope will not be the last one, nor will the one to come after him be the last. The church will go on.
Speaker 2:One unique characteristic of our day and time is the adulation the Pope receives. This really began with Pius XII, who was possessed of a giant intellect and was thrust into the international spotlight by the circumstances of the World War. In a continent ravaged by bullets and ideologies and staked out by barbed wire and concentration camps, his words inspired millions and his role became a light in the darkness for a whole civilization. More than most popes before him, pius XII became the object of attention and praise. With the advent of modern media, this focus has only grown. It reached the apex with Pope St John Paul II, who was the cynosure of the entire planet for decades. His travels, his writings, his interventions made international news over and over. No doubt the most secluded tribesmen in the most impenetrable jungles had some notion of this famous face in the world at that time. It's hard to know if Francis was more famous, but he certainly was well-known.
Speaker 2:As with John Paul, people go to Rome and attend the papal audiences to catch a glimpse of him in the popemobile or to be present for a papal blessing, and also that they're able to say they had seen the Pope. Traditionally, pilgrims came to Rome in order to pray at the tombs of the apostles, to pray at the site of St Peter's burial, the Basilica of St Peter's on Vatican Hill, and at the site of St Paul's execution on the Via Acque Salviae. That was the goal of making one's way to Rome. It was also the place where innumerable saints and martyrs were memorialized and celebrating. Coming to Rome to see the Pope was not part of the plan for most people. In fact, who the Pope was was of little consequence to most people. The cult of personality had not built up around him. Outside the royalty of Europe, who had to deal with the pope and the papal office as the head of one state to another, outside of them, the pope was virtually unknown.
Speaker 2:Whether it's better this way, for the papal figure to be relatively anonymous, or in our modern dispensation, where the pope competes to be a media superstar, that'll be left for historians to decide. Suffice it to say this pope is well known. His passing matters to us. His successor will matter as well.
Speaker 2:Now there is an odd conundrum among all those people who peddle their anxieties and make so much hay from the dire prophecies of this age. On the one hand, they expose their anxiety about the authenticity of the papal office. They want it to be the heartbeat of the world and the center around which all of the faith revolves. The pope is, for them, the embodiment of the faithful Christian and the head of all the church is to be. At the same time, they hold the papacy to be fragile and insubstantial, rocked by the winds of time and change, in danger of capsizing in the rough waters of the day. They insist the office be unchanging and deeply rooted, linked in unbroken strength to the life of Christ, even while they insist, at the same time, that it will be pulled up by the unfaithfulness of the Pope to come, or the Pope just reigning or the insubstantial church he represented. In all these things, it appears they can't make up their mind. In consequence, they share their conflicting visions in a froth of predictions and warnings and jeremiads against everything they don't like. Needless to say there are people who didn't like this pope. This is, of course, true in every generation.
Speaker 2:I remember the criticism during the time of Pope St John Paul directed at his policies, his many encyclicals and his administration. There were lots of people, very high-placed church men and women, who thought his decisions were heavy-handed and lacked the insight sufficient to the times. In their opinion, he was too medieval, too right-wing, too heady and without enough heart. As a matter of fact, most of what he's now celebrated for he was first criticized for. As his body deteriorated and he slipped into his dotage, there were critics who were merciless on him. He may have been a saintly presence and dignified the papal office with his many gifts, but he was not above pointed and sometimes very accurate criticism. That's not unusual. No pope is without fault, after all.
Speaker 2:While we claim, as a matter of teaching, the infallibility of the pope, there's no part of this dogma guaranteeing that he will be accurate in every evaluation, certain in every decision or faultless in every embodiment of his administration. In all these areas, the Pope's merely a man who lives his life and crafts his work in the same way every other man does. For example, when Pope John Paul assessed the political decisions of Latin American governments and contrasted them with the policies and decisions they could have made. He was speaking as head of the Catholic Church, but he was not invoking some infallible guide of how to run a country. He was giving his opinion of how a country could be run if its leaders' eyes were open to other options and in his opinion, he could be rightly and severely criticized. This was as true concerning all the other opinions he rendered in the course of his papacy about those things apart from the life of morals and the faith. It's simply a truism, but not everyone is unanimous in the Pope's decisions.
Speaker 2:Francis seemed to have the power to capture people's imagination. People were not undecided about him. He seemed to be able to bring forward a powerful response, positive or negative, from just about everyone. It is certainly the case that he did what other popes have not done. Then again, no other pope has been in the situation in which Pope Francis found himself leading the Church at the beginning of the 21st century. You might say that had he tried to lead just as other popes had, he would have been unfaithful to the prescription of his role, which is to lead the church as it is, not as it used to be, not or as he'd like it to be, but to urge it to be faithful to the challenge of Christ among us today, to carry the message of the gospel into the world today, to be the presence of Christ for everyone today.
Speaker 2:The best description of Pope Francis' administration I've heard came from the speaker at our clergy convocation last year. Our speaker reminded us that the Pope was a Jesuit and the Jesuit charism is always to go to the margins, to find their identity at the edges rather than at the center. Jesuits, he said, are most likely to be found pushing out the church's identity and purpose at those margins, and he gave us this image world. From feminist theology to astrophysics, from an analysis of power dynamics and social systems to a description of the movement of bacteria, flagella to propel it in liquid. There will be a major author in the field with an SJ behind his name, that is, there'll be a Jesuit there. That's where the Jesuits are, on the margins of thought and practice and that's where they're supposed to be, which is where Pope Francis was.
Speaker 2:On Ash Wednesday in previous years he was at the bus station in Rome placing ashes on the heads of those arriving and leaving. On Holy Thursday he was at the state-run addiction clinic washing the feet of Muslim drug addicts. As Europe is groaning under the policies of open borders. The Pope visited the site where an overloaded boat capsized and the men aboard drowned. He was at the margins and one of the costs of being there is to be criticized. It is at the margins, after all, and not at the center, where so many others are. To be in one place is not to be at the other, and it is an insuperable difficulty to be in one place at the price of not being at the other.
Speaker 2:Our speaker's evaluation of Francis' papacy spoke to his formation and his personality. I suppose it also speaks about those cardinals who elected him. Criticism is simply part of the papal life. Of course, criticism is also justified. There were corrupt and awful popes in the history of the church. Their lives and decisions make any critique of our current popes into vast historical wastelands. Being angry because the pope isn't clear enough about some moment of teaching or some aspect of the church pales in comparison to those other popes who murdered their rivals, placed their sons and daughters into positions of power and ran the Vatican as if it were the Cirque du Soleil performing in Las Vegas. It may be the case. There has not been such a lineup of great men in the history of the church in a long time, when criticism began to flow on social media and among the talking heads in the church.
Speaker 2:We should know that it has to have some balance. We've been in much worse places amid much worse characters than any time we know of now. Focusing on corruption and awfulness obscures the saintliness and general holiness of so many of the popes. However, not everything written about them is true, but there are enough true things about the popes to make your eyes pop out. But we're often so captured by the outrageous and blinded by badness we don't see the dignity of so many of the faithful, holy men who have occupied the papal office. Our age has produced an entire line of saintly dedicated men who've poured out their lives in service to the whole church and who have left a legacy of sacrificial faithfulness for everyone. We've been blessed in our age. Mostly, we don't see it because it's our age.
Speaker 2:This blindness is most exemplified in a brief article written by Eamon Duffy. He maintains that in the whole line of papal history there were really only two good popes. All the others throughout history he disregarded as mere climbers, weak, grasping men who scarcely deserved to be called Christian, much less, saintly, leaders of the church. He places even St Peter in his category of dismissal. The perfect embodiment of all the popes should be is his hero, pope John Paul XXIII. According to Duffy, this man was exactly one half of all the good popes that ever existed.
Speaker 2:All these others didn't meet his strict standard for real visionary leadership. Of course, it's always hard to define what this leadership ought to be as of now, for example, most everything the quote-unquote harsh papal teachings have criticized over the last century are ideas and policies that have laid waste to our society and diminished our humanity in every way. It turns out that, over and over, the popes have been mostly right and their critics mostly wrong about just about everything, especially when it comes to the issues touching on sexuality and the prospering of the human person in our society. It's easy to demand visionary leaderships. It's much harder to accept a vision contrary to what we don't want to hear and don't want to do. In the end, it's not easy being Eamon Duffy's pope. Or, it might be said, if only Eamon were pope, all would be well in his mind's eye. Or better to say, if only the pope would do what we want, we wouldn't have any anxiety or criticism about him.
Speaker 2:It is a bit ironic Reading Duffy's article, which was written almost 20 years ago. He criticizes Pope John Paul because he was so harsh on modern Catholics who aren't excited about the Church's teaching on sexual ethics. John Paul was especially hard on the life issues, going so far as to label our society as part of the culture of death. In Duffy's view, this was simply beyond the pale. Now, after 20 years in which millions are aborted, assisted suicide is now legal all over the Western world, and no Western society cares enough for life to reproduce itself. It makes his hysteria about the pope being an irrelevant, twisted, pathological moralist seem pretty out of touch. Turns out, john Paul knew a lot more about the world that he was seeing than Eamon Duffy did.
Speaker 2:Now no one knows who the next pope is going to be. When he is elected, there will be no end of speculation concerning what he represents and what his policies will be. Endless commentary will describe where the church will go, given his probable choices and his awareness of the challenges of the day, and at each step he will be dogged by criticism and second-guessing. There will be those who are convinced he embodies the side of the angels and those who are certain he's the end of all things. Amid it all, the church will go on as it has all these centuries and we will pray for him as well, for his health, his heart and his holiness. That God might inspire and protect each of them in him, because he'll be our pope after all. Back in just a moment. Welcome back to our final segment, faith in Verse. I have a poem today called.
Speaker 2:In the Shop, as I entered the morning shop, I saw a wizened, gray-haired gentleman. Poets of ages past in their work would draw wry conclusions. We would each understand and invite us to know we were seeing one who had weathered the costly storm of life he had in him, now congealing into the last stages of his sure form With toothless grin and vacant stare. The sum of trouble on his shoulders invite us to look and become aware of life's weighty slide of stones and boulders. This is today, not then.
Speaker 2:For his part, he looked at the screen of 80s MTV, mouthing a total eclipse of the heart with passion evident to all who could see Graying. Gentlemen are not as they used to be when the world was then more cruel. It's no surprise for all of us to see the wizened ones battening on such thin gruel. Perhaps it was ever so then as now, the years bring not wisdom but regress. Age becomes only what time will allow those who summit live their true interest. That's In the Shop. The life of the church goes on, especially most markedly in this Easter season. I hope that in the weeks to come you can join us as we continue to explore what it means to be Living Catholic.
Speaker 1:Living Catholic is a production of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City for Oklahoma Catholic Radio. To learn more, visit okcrorg.