"Are we in a cult?" | August 2, 2026

“Promote the cult of Blessed Stanley Rother.” When the Vatican sent that instruction after Blessed Stanley's beatification, it sounded like a technical line from Rome, but it sparked something concrete here in Oklahoma: his remains were moved so more people could visit, a shrine rose up as a place of prayer and pilgrimage and the wider Church began hearing a modern martyr’s name with fresh attention. 

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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.

Transcript

Welcome And Martyrdom Anniversary

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This is living Catholic faith with Father Donald. Deals with Living Catholic faith in our time. And finally hope in his word. And now you're hoping Father Don Wolf.

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Welcome, Oklahoma, to Living Catholic. I'm on Sr. Don Wolfe, rector of the shrine of Blessed Stanley Rother. We've now passed the 45th anniversary of the martyrdom of Blessed Stanley Rother. There's been a number of celebrations of this signal date here in Oklahoma and elsewhere. And slowly the news about Stanley Rother is filtering out into the wider world, both in the U.S. and in Guatemala.

Beatification Orders And Shrine Origins

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When the Archbishop received the news of the beatification of Father Stan in 2017, it came with additional instructions. These instructions came from the Dicastery of Saints, which provided the Archdiocese with the prompting to make the life and the cult of the Blessed more acceptable and notable in the local church, which caused the Archbishop to direct that the remains of Blessed Stanley be moved from the cemetery at O'Carchie to Resurrection Cemetery, so the site of his resting place could be more easily visited. And it initiated the planning and execution of the construction of the Blessed Stanley Rother Shrine. With this direction from the dicastery, all of the initiatives and processes were put in place. And it has resulted in what we know and see in place now, the shrine of Blessed Stanley. Certainly it has made an enormous impact on the life of the church here in Oklahoma. Every weekend we visit with people who've come from all over the country to pray here and to visit the resting place and the remains of Blessed Stanley Rother. And even wider than the boundaries of the U.S., there have been many, many people who've come, especially from Mexico and Guatemala, to visit and to pray with us here. Clearly, the presence of the shrine has fulfilled one of the purposes for its construction. It has promoted the cult of Blessed Stanley Rother.

What The Church Means By Cult

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And I should take this space to mention that when we use the word cult as it's used by the Vatican dicastery, we're not using it in the same way as it is written of by journalists. In their usage, a cult is a deviant religious group that demands ideological conformity, blind obedience, and bizarre beliefs among a group that defines itself as separate from and superior to the credence and practices of most other people. The focus of the usage of the word can move from the content of belief, as in the cult of astrology, to the practices that set the group apart from the rest of people, like the cult of vegetarianism. But the Vatican uses the word in its original definition, which is the organizing principle beliefs and practices of a society. It is the cult of a society that produces a culture, that is, that produces the sum of what a people believe and do. To promote the cult of a saint is to promote belief in the holiness and example the saint embodies. It's also the practice of petition of intercession by the saint in the concerns and procedures of ordinary life.

Saints Who Form A Culture

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The cult of Our Lady, for example, includes the many prayers offered in her memory, the invocation of her intercession, especially those prompted by reciting the rosary, as well as the many theological developments based on her identity and her faithfulness and participation in God's plan. The cult of Our Lady in the Middle Ages produced the culture of the Western world. All of the great cathedrals, for example, constructed in Western and Northern Europe during the High Middle Ages, were all dedicated to Mary. The greatest examples of masonry architecture in history are part of the culture of the West. They're based on the cult of Mary. Cult forming culture is robust and multiple. It has many roots in the lives of the saints. These roots helped our own culture to grow and to sustain itself. The dedication to the practice of voluntary poverty and the sacrificial service to the poor, for example, is part of the cult of St. Francis of Assisi. It has formed the culture of the modern world. Missionary activity among the populations of Africa and India is part of the cult of St. Francis Xavier. It's also contributed to forming the Christian culture of the 20th century. The cult of St. Martin of Tours, who sacrificed his own comfort to serve the poor and in so serving recognized Christ's presence in the disenfranchised. That produced the culture of service and charity that marks every governmental program and each level of responsibility of our society in our day. Cult produces culture. To promote the cult of a saint is to promote the imitation of his example, to further an appreciation of his holiness, to instantiate a recognition of his unique character, and establish a program of invocation for his intercession. That's what the Vatican had in mind by asking the Church of Oklahoma to promote the cult of Blessed Stanley Rother. The building of the shrine, placing the body of Blessed Stanley in the chapel, celebrating every weekend with the Sacred Heart Parish, the largest parish in the state of Oklahoma, contributed to promoting and developing the cult of the Blessed among us. Those are the purposes of the shrine and the focus of our recognition of Blessed Stanley's place in our faith lives, in the culture of being a Catholic in Oklahoma.

What We Owe A Blessed

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Having celebrated the anniversary of Blessed Stanley and calling to mind once more the specific nature of his holiness, we're left to ask ourselves how exactly we're given to develop our faithful response to Stan's beatitude. What are we to do with our relationship to Stan? And how are we to relate to His holiness and the presence of His example in our lives? Those aren't idle questions. They are the exact focus of our recognition of His sanctity. If we're to continue to pray for the canonization of Blessed Stanley, we're promoting His example to the whole church. It's not too much to analyze what we ourselves are to do in our relationship with Him. And the first aspect of His blessedness is to acknowledge that we celebrate more than the facts of His life and example. He was indeed faithful to His commitment to His people and extraordinarily brave in His willingness to remain with them in the face of danger. The sum of His life was an example of trust in God's providence. It was a true artifact of being formed by the will of God at work in Stan's life. But rather than simply being animated by an idea or a promise, Stan allowed his life to be formed by his trust in God's goodness. From the first stirrings of his religious consciousness to the final moments of his priestly concern, Stan's life was shaped by his commitment to seek God's will and to complete it. This is what we read about in his biography. It's what we celebrate when we pray in the room where he was killed. It's what we remember when we tour his museum. His example animates us. But there's more to his holiness than the mere fact of his faithfulness in the course of his life. That's the first fact of saintly presence. It is, in fact, the first truth of his saintly relevance. Stan's gift of faithfulness transcends the life he led as a missionary priest. His work as a faithful Christian continues now among us. Our recognition of all he has been also includes our trust in all that he's still doing. One of the most powerful examples of his saintly work took place a few years ago, just after his martyrdom.

A Family Healing After Martyrdom

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It's a story of miraculous healing and inexplicable recovery, and it involves a member of his very large family. A cousin of his, a young woman, collapsed in her apartment to be discovered by her boyfriend at the time. He called an ambulance, got her to the hospital. The doctors there called her parents, and when they arrived, the doctors began to talking to began talking to them about getting permission to harvest her organs. There was so little hope that she would recover from the trauma that she that had caused her collapse. The parents, of course, were horrified and puzzled. They didn't know what to do. They called back to their pastor for the advice. Go to the church and pray for the intercession of Stan Rother, was his advice, which they did do. The doctors offered a sliver of hope, a possible surgery that might allow her to live, but which promised almost no hope for a decent life and certainly no prospect of a normal life. Trusting in this small favor, her parents okayed the surgery. With their prayers for Stan's intercession, forming a large part of their community of support, they leaned into what the combination of surgical skill, modern pharmacology, expert nursing, and desperate petition could do. Although the doctors had warned them their daughter would most probably not regain consciousness, they hoped for an improvement. At each stage, marking the levels of her recovery, the doctors warned her parents not to hope for too much. If she were conscious, she would probably not be responsive. If she were responsive, she wouldn't be able to communicate. If she could communicate, she wouldn't be able to speak. If speaking, she wouldn't be able to move, if able to move, she'd be unable to walk, if able to walk, she would not thrive, and on and on and on. At each marker and caution, though, she got better and better. Eventually she left the hospital, with the only lasting effects seeming to be a scar on her throat where her tracheotomy had been, along with a very slight hitch in her gait. It was miraculous in every way. It surprised all of those most knowledgeable in her care. To have survived was a miracle. To recover was a theophany. The petition of Blessed Stanley's intercession was key to the prospect of her survival. This succession of events was miraculous, especially among the doctors and nurses who cared for her. The outcome was unexpected and outside of the bounds of the normal. It was in every way a demonstration of the intimacy of Stan to the Divine, as well as his accessibility to the needs of those who petitioned him. This is the surest and most powerful connection we have to those who are saintly. It's also the most powerful demonstration of their presence among us. They become part of our spiritual lives because they matter to us. There have been other great works attributed to the intercession of Blessed Stanley Rother as well. All of them examples of the power of intercessory prayer and the capable presence of Blessed Stanley in the community of the faithful. His prayers matter to us. We often need to be reminded, especially when we talk about the blessed and the saintly in our religious environment, that we're not talking about angels or spirits, but about the confident presence of those who are with us on the journey of faith, which is the best description of the saintly presence that we're so confident in.

Saints As Friends On The Road

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These people who have gone before us in faith, they are part of our journey to the fullness of the Father's blessing. They are, in sum, no more than someone who has completed his journey and now accompanies us on ours. Because these saints are part of what we do and how we live, they're part of the struggle and part of the promise that we enjoy and endure. As we've noted previously, the first attribute of saintly presence is that these men and women are our friends. They're present with us on the journey of life and provide us with all good example of God's promises fulfilled. It's not something foreign to us. This accompaniment is no more than what we recognize from the community that we're all a part of. We all know what it's like, say, when a young man who's gotten married and is facing for the first time the challenges of making a life with another and taking on the role of provider and protector, in order to get a grip on what's in front of him, that man goes and talks to an uncle or someone that he can share his concerns with. It may be the first time in his life that he be he that he has begun to understand what the challenges and the boundaries of real life look like. And he realizes that befriending the one who has lived out these challenges is the first way to begin to address them. Or he may become so desperate to find the answers that he finally turns to someone whom he's never thought might have the answers, but he's come to appreciate that he now faces that that person has faced the same challenges, so might have some wisdom in answering them. That kind of thing happens every day in the normal course of life. We make friends with those who can help us by their friendship. Not only that, it's a friendship prompted by our need to have a friend. We reach out in our need to those who can help us, often because we have no one else and nothing else to turn to. It doesn't make the friendship less purposeful or less real. It simply prompts the depth and breadth of the friendship offered to us when we come to them knowing we need what they have to offer. How many times have you listened to a young man who confessed that he never appreciated who his father was until he himself had to face the challenges of marriage and babies and bills and work on his own? In his need, this young man understands how powerful the connection to his own father becomes. This connection is much the same with the heroes of faithfulness. We can come to them in our need, prompted by the desperation we face, and ask them to help us, precisely because we're confident in their experience and their presence amid all the needs we've come to know. We ask them to fill out the blanks in our understanding and accompany us on the continuing journey to a life that resounds with holiness and faithfulness. We ask them to be our friends, our companions on the journey of living. And certainly we know that we can turn to our friends for their prayers as certainly as we can do anything else in our needs. When we're sick and desperate, especially when we're desperate for another, we turn to those around us and we ask them to add their concerns and their prayers to our own. It's as natural as asking another for help to lift a box or carry a load. It's what we do when we know we're not enough or are strong enough to do it all. Turning to those who are with us, who've died in extraordinary holiness, is simply part of what it means to have them in our lives. Knowing they are present is to know they are present to help us. That's been recognized from the beginning. In

Relics And The Early Church Practice

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the Acts of the Apostles, the followers of St. Paul would hold on to items he'd blessed, including little pieces of cloth that he had touched. They wanted some connection to the extraordinary holiness that they had seen in him, holiness that showed itself in the miracles he had performed. He may have been gone in person from them, but they intuited that the residual presence symbolized by what he had touched and used were powerful reminders of who he was and what he could do. St. Paul wasn't just a memory for them, but a presence to be treasured. He was an experience to be valued. The early church recognized these connections. It was part of the practice of the faithful to value their intimacy with those whose holiness had been demonstrated by the course of their lives. This connection was especially important in the case of those who had been martyred, which of course included Saint Paul. In the earliest stories we have of the life of the church, the remains of the martyrs were collected and venerated because of their evocative power to connect the faithful with the faith. That is, their remains became a gateway to the example of true, faithful living. And in a world of intense communal life, as in the early church, to be connected to the saint was to be connected to all that he and she did and how he or she lived and died. This connection made the faith truly real in every way. And this is the powerful aspect of the saintly example. Now, faith can be described in as abstract terms, so in fact so abstract as to be vaporous and insubstantial. We can talk about the faith as if it were Sherlock Holmes, a character with its own reality and dynamic, but all completely on the level of imagination and adherence. And for many people, it's not much more than this. In fact, this is the temptation running throughout the scriptures, to make the awareness of God and God at work as nothing much more than a species of ideas and attitudes. Saints change this. They put us in contact with the real, with the blinding truth of God's present of God present in the midst of our lives. This is no doubt why, for example, the early Christian community would gather up the ashes at the pyre of St. Polycarp when he was burned in the arena. Although he was 85 years old and was at the end of his life, the Roman authorities decided he was too much a threat for him to continue as the bishop and leader of his people. They condemned him to death, and as they did, he instructed his people not to interfere with the sentence. He was determined to die as faithfully and as committedly as he had lived. Seeing this powerful expression of what it meant to believe, his people wanted to remember him and by remembering him, remember the explicit and active faith that he brought to them. They did this by collecting and guarding the remnants of his faithfulness. Saints are more than those who lived good lives, they are those whose lives brought the airy promises of faith into the harsh and stern reality of the day-to-day. There's almost nothing more powerful than that. It's not too unlike those who hold on to the remnants of the lives of their loved ones so as to hold on to their memory more fiercely. Queen Victoria, for example, had her husband's clothes hanging in the closet and set out by her servants every day in all the decades after his death as if he were to come back at any moment. Each day that she saw his clothes there, she felt a moment of his presence in a manner more than memory. He wasn't a saint, but his life in the woman that he married made that his made Queen Victoria's life complete, a sense of completion that she was unwilling to forgo and lessen when her husband passed away. We hold on to saints in this same manner as those who bring us what they cannot have just by themselves. At the shrine of Blessed Stanley Rother, we duplicate the practice of the early church.

Eucharist At The Shrine Altar

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We value the remains of those who have died amid extraordinary holiness, especially by way of martyrdom. As was done in the Church of Rome in the early centuries, we actually celebrate the Eucharist on the altar where the remains of Blessed Stanley Rother lie, uniting our confidence in his example to the body whose actions and sacrifice prompted the awareness of the body of Christ among his people. It's not an accident that when we proclaim the body of Christ to those who gather for Mass, we're also calling their attention to the truth that this same body, the body of Christ, is present among us in our community of life together. This includes the body of Christ lived out by Blessed Stanley's example. It also comprises the sum of our history, the body of Christ. All of the billions who have lived and believed and who have died before us are also a part of the body of Christ, all at once with us. Blessed Stanley makes up the body of Christ with us. We can go to Him with the needs we experience, we can trust Him with the prayers to be offered. Our hope is in His powerful intercession for the needs we have. As in the many examples of those who have received a response to their prayers, so we anticipate Blessed Stanley's help as we make our way through the difficult thickets of life. He's simply a part of what it means to live the life of the church in our time and place. This is also a part of the growing awareness of how central the life of sanctity is for us.

A Local Saint For Modern Chaos

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When we see holiness lived among the situations and environments we're familiar with, it becomes an attraction to us. It's one thing to imagine the challenges they faced, for example, faced by St. Francis of Assisi, who had to face down the attractions of wealth and privilege so that he could live a heroic life of commitment in God's service. But even when we actively imagine, it's hard for us to place ourselves in the midst of his society, in which wealth and poverty were harsh dividing lines, and in which no one passed from one to the other. A society in which the wealthy despised the poor and distance even their prayers from them. That is, it's hard for us to enter into Francis's world and to find in him an intimate friend. It's not so difficult to find Blessed Stanley a friend. He's from here. He grew up amid the challenges we still face. His response to the call to service came amid the temptations and distractions that are still part of our lives together. And most of all, he faced the enormous complications of trying to live the faith amid the politics and positions almost in the Impossible to understand in their enormity. He didn't know much about the convert conversations going on in Washington or Guatemala City or Moscow about the situations developing in Latin America. What he did know was the product of his commitment on the ground around Lago Atitlan, there in Guatemala. His life and priesthood were painted in the foreground of this jungled landscape. They became the focus of all of us who are trying to understand him. And they carry with them an example of how to do our best to understand and comply with the commands to serve God where we can. In all of this, Blessed Stanley becomes the great companion to each of us who feels like the headlines in the news are from another planet, and the challenges of the day are as if in another language. Stan, in all of this, is a friend in life for us. Perhaps this is why his intercession has been so powerfully demonstrated amid the powerful challenges of sickness and injury. His life is one that has triumphed over intricate problems and impossible complications, which is why we turn to him. This is why we reach out to ask for his intercession as a product of our friendship with him. And as in every friendship, it's a way for the relationship to grow. The more we depend on and turn to the ones we know, the more we know our lives to be woven into theirs. Friendship grows when we are friends to each other. So it is with those whose holiness makes our lives. Just as in marriage, for example, performing as a spouse is part of finding what it means to be a good spouse. Trusting and including the one who is to be our friend on our life's journey helps to grow the friendship. The more we act to invite blessed Stanley into the challenges of our journey, especially into the difficult and complicated parts, the more powerfully our friendship will grow.

Friendship With Stan Leads To Christ

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All relationships are this way. And let me hasten to add, all of this is to strengthen our connection to the person of Christ. Stan was above all a friend to Jesus, whose life and presence encouraged and enabled him throughout every part of his journey. We're emboldened in our following of Christ by our knowledge and intimacy with one whose friendship with Christ emboldened his own journey. Who better to lead us into a full and capable relationship with Christ than one whose life embodies it? This is the gift of Blessed Stanley to us. We pray for the intercession of Blessed Stanley in our needs. We direct him to the difficulties of our lives so that he can intercede for us. And so let us all pray that the whole church will recognize the gift of his example so as to benefit from his intercession as well. Stan is alive to the presence of Christ. May we be alive to his presence as well. Back in just a moment.

A Poem On Memory

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Memory is a gift given not to us all and not well. We look back, we sift the days as we recall that which rose and fell. Among the feeble and the old, this is a capacity fragile, marked by true hesitation, as they all together fold daylight and wild dreams agile into wispy inspiration. They nor we can ever know the deepest foundation of what passed truly. Their days and years ago become steepest gradations of what becomes newly. Among the vigorous and the young, memories are easily made, in abundance showering. To all experiences clung, they seldom fail or fade, in fact are overpowering. But can be too much, too powerful tools in the problems of the day, are just real enough to frighten and fool all along the way. Until we discover, on our own, memories are not just there, untouched, unspoiled, true, and are not pristine and alone, but are manufactured where encountered become new. So we tread carefully, we must, as we remember all, all that was and now is. Knowing the day is a plus we when in any part we recall what is ours and what his That's memory.

Closing And Where To Learn More

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Living Catholic is a production of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City for Oklahoma Catholic Radio. To learn more, visit okcr.org.