Aaron Wolf wasn’t a Catholic. But he made me a better one.
Aaron was my best friend and coworker for over 18 years at Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. From 1999 to 2017, I spent more time with Aaron than with anyone other than my wife, Amy. And if you restricted the comparison to waking hours, Aaron probably had the edge, even considering weekends and vacations.
We were happy warriors together in the attempt to turn the cultural tide and to revive Christendom. Providence had brought us together in the Chronicles’ offices in a nondescript Victorian house on North Main Street in Rockford, Illinois — an unlikely place from which to sally forth to slay the dragons that threaten to burn everything good and true and beautiful to the ground.
Unlikely, that is, unless you understand the truth encapsulated in Chronicles’ motto: There are no political solutions to cultural problems. If the answers aren’t to be found in the actions of state legislators and governors, congressmen and presidents, but in conversion of hearts and minds and the rebuilding of families and parishes and communities, then Rockford, Illinois, like Huntington, Indiana, is as good a place as any to start.
Amy and I were transplants to Rockford, but Aaron and his wife, Lorrie, were born and reared there. Aaron came out of a Baptist tradition, but his studies at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, under the great evangelical theologian Harold O.J. Brown (the religion editor for Chronicles), led him back to liturgical Christianity and ultimately to the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod.
Aaron loved the Scriptures, Old Testament and New, and especially (as you might expect from a Lutheran) St. Paul. And in his life, he lived the Book of Job.
His eldest daughter has suffered for years from the effects of juvenile diabetes. His second-eldest son has Duchenne muscular dystrophy and is confined to a wheelchair.
Five years ago, on his 40th birthday, Aaron died. He went into shock, and his heart stopped. The doctors never figured out what happened, but they revived him in the emergency room, and he was soon back in the office, putting out the next issue of Chronicles.
Four months later, their century-old wood-frame farmhouse burned to the ground in the early morning hours. Aaron had risen early and noticed the fire. The entire family escaped unharmed, but they lost everything they owned, except for a cast-iron frying pan that they retrieved from the smoldering embers.
Through it all, Aaron never complained. He never cursed God. With every trial, his faith grew stronger, and he drew his wife and his children and all of us who knew him closer to Christ.
A month ago, an hour before the first installment of this column went to press, the news team realized that the column didn’t have a name. The first thought that came to my mind was to text Aaron:
I have one hour to come up with a rubric for my new Our Sunday Visitor column. It’s going to be a (even more) Catholic version of the thing I always do.
A few minutes later, he replied:
“All Things New” — as a play on Rerum Novarum plus the obvious Scripture, a kind of new or fresh way of looking at the everyday things that everyone experiences without seeing the eternal significance.
Aaron taught me the eternal significance of everyday experiences. We were blood brothers — separated from full communion, but washed in the blood of the same Lamb.
Aaron was a gentle giant with a heart of gold. On Easter Sunday, a day that began the night before at the Easter Vigil at his Lutheran church–when two of his children were confirmed in the faith — that heart gave out. Before it did, however, he told his family that this Easter Sunday had been the happiest day of his life.
This time, the doctors couldn’t bring him back. But Aaron will rise again when the Christ who rose on that first Easter returns on the last day.
Aaron Wolf wasn’t a Catholic. But he made me a better one.
What more could you ask for in a friend?
Scott P. Richert is publisher for Our Sunday Visitor.
