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
What is the Pope's Job Description? | July 13, 2025
What does a pope actually do? Beyond the ceremonial trappings and media spotlight, how should we measure the effectiveness of the Church's supreme leader? In this episode, Father Wolf takes us on a thought-provoking journey into the heart of papal leadership, offering seven essential dimensions that define authentic spiritual governance.
The pope must first be a genuine Christian whose life conforms to Christ's example. The demanding responsibilities of institutional leadership can easily overwhelm spiritual priorities, making this seemingly simple requirement a profound challenge. "The more pressing the decisions about sustaining the church, the easier it is to give up the harder work of listening faithfully to Christ's presence," Father Wolf explains.
Moving beyond personal spirituality, the pope must effectively listen to the Church's diverse voices while contextualizing what he hears within salvation history. This storytelling function helps believers understand current challenges as chapters in God's ongoing work rather than unprecedented crises.
Perhaps most courageously, authentic papal leadership requires admitting failure when it occurs. While papal infallibility applies narrowly to teaching on faith and morals, the broader workings of Church administration remain subject to human error.
Father Wolf concludes that the pope's attentiveness to the Spirit's movement constitutes his greatest gift – balancing the Church's essential continuity with openness to divine innovation.
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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 Sacred Heart Parish and the rector of the Shrine of Blessed Stanley Rother. We've been talking about the new pope, and all this talk about the pope had me thinking about the papacy in a manner I hadn't spent much time with before, and it's this what does a pope really do? I know it's not the kind of thing we spend a lot of time thinking about, since there really isn't an evaluation form or a supervisor's review concerning the Pope's job. And even if there were, we probably wouldn't be consulted about our version of whether he had done his work the right way or not. But the question still lingers what's the Pope supposed to be doing? Of course, this is a small version of a larger question concerning all church leaders what are all the rest of us supposed to be doing? As well, we can come up with all kinds of things the vicar of Christ should be up to, but as a leader in the church, he should be performing his version of what the rest of us do. And what's that? Oddly enough, we don't have a clear notion of that job description. It's a little fuzzy for us. Perhaps we ought to spend some time thinking about it.
Speaker 2:The truth of the matter is that in our day and age, we all have our opinion about the Pope, just like we do of the President. Even if you're not involved in the politics of the church or the country, even if you don't go for the things people say about their personalities, and even if the ups and downs of policies and positions aren't your cup of tea, you have some opinion of the people who fill up all of the reporting in the media. It's simply a part of our life these days in which the faces and quotes and personalities of our leaders end up intruding on our lives in just about every way. Opinions are all downstream of all this reporting. So wouldn't it be best to have a measuring tape, a way to think about what's really supposed to go on as we think about the Pope? We should be able to pull out our yardstick and size up what's going on as we think about the church and about the Pope's leadership. So here are a few elements of what the Pope does. The first is that he be a Christian. I mean that sounds odd in the extreme because it's so blindingly obvious, but in truth it's not obvious at all.
Speaker 2:The leader of the church should in every way have a life conformed to the life of Christ. It means that the measures of his life have not been politics or position, but his desire to be faithful to the presence of Christ and his calling as a follower of Jesus. As Pope, of course, he will have had a long history of accomplishment and promotion, and he will have learned a lot about and participated in the politics of the Church. He will have been a cardinal and a bishop, both of which puts him in the maelstrom of opinions and movements in the politics of the church. He will have been a cardinal and a bishop, both of which puts him in the maelstrom of opinions and movements in the life of the church, many of which are passionately active and sometimes opposed to one another. But in all that fills his life, his ultimate measure has to be his fidelity to the life that Christ has called him to. Forgiveness, forbearance, faithfulness these have to be the watchwords of his life. He has to be a Christian first. Everything else comes later.
Speaker 2:I think we underestimate how difficult this can be for those who ascend to office in the church. It's not because they're duplicitous and power-hungry, but because the work they're asked to do is difficult and demands mature and sophisticated discernment. They're placed in positions where they have to make decisions about other people and about the good of the church and what's best for the long term good of the life of the faithful, and all the tough decisions that go into providing for and leading an institution. And in the midst of these demands it's easy to lose focus on the presence of Christ. The more pressing the decisions about how to sustain the work of the church and fulfill its demands, the easier it is to give up the harder work of listening faithfully to the assurances of Christ's presence and responding bravely to Jesus' invitation. As in every job, the work can overwhelm and then drown any other sensibility, including the invitation to grace from Jesus himself.
Speaker 2:The Pope always has to be aware of his first vocation as a believer. He isn't asked to act like he's faithful or just go through the motions of prayer or simply nod toward the guidance of the Holy Spirit. He is to embody these realities in every way. The Pope must be, first of all, a believer in the Lordship of Jesus Christ and the work of God in the world to bring salvation to all. Without this measure, everything else is mostly useless.
Speaker 2:The second aspect of his work is that the Pope has to listen. This often seems vacuous because there are all kinds of ways to listen, some less effective than others. Actually, the structure of the papal office is such that a great deal of listening already takes place. Every seven years, every bishop in the world has to come to Rome and visit with the pope, and in preparation for this visit, they have to prepare a thorough report about every aspect of their diocese, all the statistics about their resources and services and people, and while this can be numbing in their completeness, they do give a sense of what's going on in their part of the world. And the pope listens to this, reviews their reports and spends time with them talking about their work and their plans, and no doubt he has the chance to challenge them about what they're not doing. And all of this is vital to the life of the Church. Of course, the bishops have to be accountable for what they're doing and what's going on in their dioceses, and without some sort of reporting there'd be no way to keep track of what's happening or not happening throughout the church.
Speaker 2:The Pope has to be intimately involved with these things, but, more important than listening, he has to be able to place what he hears into context. The people of the church have to know that they're being heard and that what they experience is part of the life of the whole church as one, not simply an eruption of the life of faith or an interruption in the work of the Spirit. In their time and place, he has to hear what's going on and he has to be able to understand it for what it is. That isn't very easy. The world is a big place and the life of the faith is intricate and complicated. The world is a big place and the life of the faith is intricate and complicated. It's never enough simply to be content that mass is being celebrated and people are being served. The gospel is supposed to be proclaimed to every creature under heaven, and that means to every situation and every structure there is. The notion of creature is all created things, which includes things like the tax code or financial arrangements, the military, universities, health care procedures, the way men and women get along, legislatures and all of the other organizations and arrangements making up our world. It's the Pope's job to understand how the gospel is to be proclaimed and lived in the midst of these realities. His job is to be preoccupied with offering the hope of the gospel to every part of humanity, including all of the configurations and elements that sustain us. The papacy is to ensure we have hope in Christ in the midst of every part of our lives. It's a hard job, one in which he is constantly challenged to understand what's really going on and what are the true needs of the people of the church.
Speaker 2:The third thing is related to the second. The Pope has to be able continually to tell the story of the gospel and the people of faith. We're written into the work of God in the world. As St Augustine said, we belong to the church of Adam in that God's will has been unfolding among us in the entire history of humanity and we are the product of this power. In our day and time, what's going on with us is the work of God in the world From age to age, god's initiative can look different and have its unique characteristics, but it's all part of the work of God from the world. From age to age, god's initiative can look different and have its unique characteristics, but it's all part of the work of God from the beginning.
Speaker 2:The Pope is to be able to ensure our understanding of the Lord's story in our place and time. The easiest thing in the world, of course, is to look back at the previous generation or the previous hundred years or the last millennium and decide that things are worse off than they used to be. In our parents' age, people were more faithful. In our grandparents' day, people believed with greater fervor. In our great-grandparents' time, their neighbors wanted to build the church and they often sacrificed to the extreme to see it happen. And on and on with examples that go all the way back to Saints Peter and Paul happen, and on and on with examples that go all the way back to Saints Peter and Paul. But that's not telling a story. It's simply recounting comments.
Speaker 2:The story of the life of the church is the power of God at work in our time to animate and empower us to understand and to complete the work he's given us. We can do this only if we know we're part of all who've come before us. The Pope weaves the life of the Church out of the strands of the past to form the fabric of today. When we know we're part of the story, we have the courage to change what needs to be changed and to preserve what's vital for our continuation. The story of the life of the faith as it goes forward lets us know where we are and how we form ourselves to be the presence of God at work. For example, all over the world, the church faces the prospect of new languages and new peoples filling the pews in places that had once been settled in composition and understanding. Pastors everywhere struggle to minister to their people, and that now includes those whose cultures and experiences are strangers among them.
Speaker 2:But to know that this is the story of the gospel from the opening pages of the Acts of the Apostles and has been a living element of the history of the church in every age, that allows all of us to bring out the life of the church and to bring out of it a powerful hope and a comforting assurance. Knowing that we've done this before allows us to celebrate in hopefulness and joy rather than to stew in our failures or to be trapped in our despond. When St Augustine, for example, listed the challenges of his diocese in the 5th century as he lay dying, he wrote of his need for new buildings, better catechists, priests who spoke the language of the people and additional money for his projects. His list was responsive to the arrival of the mountain peoples who were streaming into the church and disrupted the normal and the everyday that he was used to. In fact, st Augustine's list is a list every bishop in the US has, and almost every bishop in the world is challenged by Knowing it's.
Speaker 2:Part of the story of the church in every age is to know that the work of the Spirit continues to be alive and present in our age. The Pope must be able to tell us the story of ourselves so that we can hear and understand all of this in our midst. Without a story, we wither. His work is to keep us vital and strong. The fourth aspect of his work is to establish the vision, the ideal that brings us forward, as it says in Proverbs that without a vision, the people perish, and so it is. This is very much tied to the previous aspect of the Pope's responsibilities, but it is the additional work of extending our story toward that which may not be obvious to us. He has to be able to look over the horizon and invite us to march toward that which remains hazy and uncertain to us. In fact, the Pope may not be perfectly clear about the vision he has. It may be unclear for him, but he knows that it's there and it lies in front of us to be clarified as we come closer. He has to provide us with the reason for going forward, and it is forward into the unknown that we go.
Speaker 2:The easiest thing in the world is to grasp the past and to be fearful of what lies ahead. Mostly we don't obsess about the past, as if we could recreate it somehow. We're too smart for that, at least most of us are. But what we do do is to look at the past, the last bit of the past, and then lay out a yardstick to measure it, and then flip the yardstick into the future. Imagining the future will simply be the present in all of its nuances and moments flipped forward, and when we do this, which all of us are tempted to, we're simply preserving the past rather than truly entering the future.
Speaker 2:The Pope's work is to make sure we're responding to the invitation to enact the work of God in our time and move in that direction. This often means that we go in directions that are not at first obvious or easily certain. That's where his leadership is often tested. It's not easy to keep the people together on their journey to the promised land of God at work among us. Moving from the past into the present, toward the future, always means leaving the past behind as the past and going forward toward the unknown. We don't destroy the past or throw it away, but we do treat it as past, as our point of origin, not as our destination or our purpose. This is a difficult work. The Pope can't do it alone, but unless it is done, the whole church suffers.
Speaker 2:The fifth aspect of the Pope's work is to admit failure. There's no guarantee the church doesn't make a mistake. Of course it does. It's made up of people like you and me who have an almost infinite capacity to miss the point, to misunderstand and to miss our cues. We do believe the Pope is protected from error when teaching faith and morals, but there is so much more to the life of the papacy than this narrow band of responsibility and stewardship.
Speaker 2:It's not only possible but certain that mistakes in administration and diplomacy and communication and evaluation take place all the time, and when they do, rather than standing on precedence or obstinance, the Pope has to recognize them and then work to correct them. Nothing can get better if no one recognizes the need to improve or to improvise. That's not as easy as it sounds. The greater the stakes involved, the harder it is to backtrack and to begin again. Just ask married couples, especially those who've been married a long time. It's not easy to begin again just because it's been a long time and so much water has passed under the bridge. But in the end, especially with regard to the life of the church, failing to recognize what's not working so that something new can begin is the greatest failing of all.
Speaker 2:Everyone wants to leverage the reputation and status of the church for his own purpose. The Pope has to be attentive to the truth and to the good of all and to make sure the pathway of the Church, in all of its actions and decision-making, serves the integrity of the Gospel and the proclamation of Christ. This often becomes doubly difficult when decision-making is intricate and laden with the reputations and personalities of many people. But it has to be done and it has to be sincere and effective. Being Pope isn't easy, especially because the life of the Church is so much more than simply the question of dogma and teaching. It also involves the lives of people and the progress of people everywhere.
Speaker 2:Sixth, the Pope must intercede for the needs of the whole Church. He's not just an administrator and a facilitator, he's also a bishop and a priest. One of his principal works is to lead his people in prayer and petition God for the needs of the whole Church. As one who encounters the needs of the Church at their apex, he has a vision of what the Church must have in order to complete its work in the world To provide these needs. His petitions to order to complete its work in the world, to provide these needs, his petitions to God's goodness, are important in every way.
Speaker 2:At the end of the 19th century, the Pope spoke out against the exploitation of working men and prayed for the integrity of human work and the nobility of the person in the face of the inhumanity of business and industry. In the opening decades of the 20th century, the popes promoted peace and prayed for the redirection of armaments and national dominance. In the years following World War I, the pope spoke out against the growing anti-Semitism and the threats against minorities and the despised, and prayed for tolerance and understanding. In the heady decade of the 60s, the Pope reminded everyone of the dangers of dehumanizing sexuality and prayed for the reintegration of the human person into the ecology of sexual wholeness and meaning. Popes have prayed for peace and have begged to stop war and violence. They've offered themselves as vessels for negotiation and settlement. They've stood as gateways to wholeness and integrity and they've begged God for the wisdom and the willingness to celebrate the goodness of the world and the glory of the creation.
Speaker 2:It's the Pope who is emboldened to ask God for divine graces to be poured out upon the world and who is endowed with the office to remind humanity of its blessedness and dignity. The Pope is to do all these things, to be a vessel of grace for everyone. It's one of his jobs. And finally, the seventh aspect of the Pope's job is to recognize the reality of sin in the world and in the working of the Church. I say this with some care because I don't want anyone to imagine the church is somehow a vehicle for sin, because it's not. But sin exists in every aspect of human decision-making and to the extent decisions are made in the life of the church, there is the prospect of sin at work.
Speaker 2:It's the job of the Pope to recognize and to call out the presence of sinful aspects of the machinery of the church and to remediate it, of the machinery of every part of human decision-making. He first has to acknowledge its reality and its inevitability. Sin is an aspect of our humanity and creeps into all we do. In fact, the first effect of sin in our lives is to deaden our awareness of the effects of sin in our lives. Keeping its presence in mind is vital to the work of the church and its effectiveness in the world. It is the work of the Pope to speak of these realities whenever they show themselves. But more than that, he also must preside over the working of people who are tempted and who sometimes give in to the sinful inclinations that haunt them. Putting in place systems that ignore these aspects of our lives or presume perfection on the part of everyone is to be foolish in the extreme. It's the Pope's charism to be aware of the corrosion of sin and to do his best to overcome it through knowledge, repentance and conversion. The pope needs to be open to the work of the Holy Spirit in his own life and in the life of the Church.
Speaker 2:Pope Francis described this as part of the work of evangelization, and he tabulated it under the category of spontaneity. For him, this signaled an aspect of Church life we don't often appreciate or value, especially when we're detailing the leadership functions in the hierarchy. Leaders are most often called to enforce norms and maintain the balance between the various energies and forces at work in the church. And, to be fair, so many of the demands of the church are for maintenance and continuity. It's hard to appreciate the energy that prompts spontaneous reactions when so much is invested rightly in valuing what has gone before. But authentic openness to the Spirit and confidence in God at work among us allows leaders the freedom to act in ways that they hadn't planned or had not been available to them in the past. When these moments come, they are a gift to the leader and to the whole church.
Speaker 2:Pope Francis valued this highly, probably as an aspect of his Latin American heritage, but it's true throughout the history of the church, from the popes who encouraged St Francis to live out his insights and his charism of poverty, to the pope who encouraged St Ignatius of Loyola to direct his energies to conquering ignorance and indifference at home rather than thirsting for soldiering in a crusade, and many other examples in our era, including Pope Paul's affirmation of the charismatic renewal and Pope John Paul II's openness to the labor unions in Poland, the power of spontaneity is the invitation to understand that God is not finished with us. Yet We've not received a closed book filled with all the details of all that God wishes for us. Instead, we've been promised a new chapter for this age of ours, one not yet written and aching for our authorship. The Pope has to be the one most open to the gift of change and to the reality of God's graces present among us. So it's easy to see it's no bed of roses being Pope. The demands are extreme and the prospects are immense. At the same time, the power of the Pope to shape and to bless the life of the faithful is beyond question. He's situated at the apex of life of the church, so that his choices to decide and to act enriches all of us Much more than the levers of authority and responsibility. That he can move his faithfulness to the movement of the Spirit in his life and among the whole church is the gift he gives. That's what it's like to be the leader of the faithful. It happens only with God's grace, of course. Back in just a moment.
Speaker 2:Welcome back to our final segment Faith in Verse. We have a poem today, segment Faith in Verse. We have a poem today called Now, this Moment. Now, this moment is our only possession, which we hear spoken of by every sage voice. It becomes our ultimate confession. The wisest made this truth their final choice.
Speaker 2:Yet the now we know passes instantly gone as time ticks inexorably away, fragile as the final words of a song hangs in the air at high note and then fades, and then, in the moment that becomes past, uncapturable for us again, but not free. We are not imprisoned by what does not last, but are held fast by its connectivity. We need not be bothered by such abstractions. Truths such as this are not our mere measure other than to claim we are God in action and are now, then, only for his good pleasure. That's now, this moment. Living Catholic is the invitation that all of us have to open our hearts and our minds and to be attentive to the work of the Spirit among us, which, of course, is the exact reason for the life of the Church. To enter into the life of the Church more fully is to be attentive to the work of the Spirit as it crisscrosses the energies of our lives. That's what we want to do here at Living Catholic, and I hope that in the weeks to come, you can join us.
Speaker 1:Living Catholic is a production of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City for Oklahoma Catholic Radio. To learn more, visit okcrorg.