Fr Ronald Rolheiser, Author at Catholic Herald

Fr Ronald Rolheiser

May 11, 2017

Classically, both in the world and in our churches, we have seen despair as the ultimate unforgivable sin. The simple notion was that neither God, nor anyone else, could save you if you simply gave up, despaired, made yourself impossible to reach. Most often in the popular mind this was applied to suicide. To die

Far from a plaster saint

May 04, 2017

Dorothy Day is alleged to have said: “Don’t call me a saint; I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.” A new biography of her by her granddaughter, Kate Hennessy, Dorothy Day: The World will be saved by Beauty – an Intimate Portrait of my Grandmother, will, I believe, go a long way in preventing

Becoming a holy beggar

April 27, 2017

With the exception of Scripture and a few Christian mystics, Christian spirituality, up to now, has been weak in presenting us with a vision for our retirement years. It’s not a mystery as to why. Until recently the majority of people died shortly after retirement and so there was no need for a highly developed

Five centuries of misunderstanding

April 20, 2017

The heart has its reasons, says Pascal, and sometimes those reasons have a long history. Recently I signed a card for a friend, a devout Baptist, who was raised to have a suspicion of Catholics. It’s something he still struggles with; but don’t we all? History eventually infects our DNA. Who of us is entirely

The empty tomb

April 13, 2017

Believers and non-believers alike have been arguing about the Resurrection since the day Jesus rose. What really happened? How was he raised from the dead? Did an actual dead body really come back to life and step out of the grave, or was the Resurrection a monumental life-changing event inside the consciousness of Jesus’s followers?

How can Good Friday be ‘good’?

April 06, 2017

Good Friday was bad long before it was good, at least from outward appearances. God was being crucified by all that can go bad in the world: pride, jealousy, distrust, wound, self-interest, sin. It’s no accident that the Gospels tell us that, as Jesus was dying, it grew dark in the middle of the day.

Doing violence in God’s name

March 30, 2017

Blaise Pascal once wrote: “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction.” How true! This has been going on since the beginning of time and is showing few signs of disappearing any time soon. We still do violence and evil and justify them in God’s name.

Our shadow and our self-knowledge

March 23, 2017

What is meant when certain schools of psychology today warn us about our “shadow”? What is our shadow? In essence, it’s this: we have within us powerful, fiery energies which, for multiple reasons, we cannot consciously face, and so we handle them by denial and repression so as not to have to deal with them.

Nothing is ever really ours

March 16, 2017

Everything is gift. That’s a principle that ultimately undergirds all spirituality, all morality and every commandment. Everything is gift. Nothing can be ultimately claimed as our own. Genuine moral and religious sensitivity should make us aware of that. Nothing comes to us by right. This isn’t something we automatically know. During a class some years

The flavour of God’s energy

March 09, 2017

All things considered, I believe that I grew up with a relatively healthy concept of God. The God of my youth, the God that I was catechised into, was not unduly punishing, arbitrary or judgmental. He was omnipresent, so that all of our sins were noticed and noted. But at the end of the day

The nature of virtue and sin

March 02, 2017

There’s an axiom which says that nothing feels better than virtue. There’s a deep truth here, but it has an underside. When we do good things we feel good about ourselves. Virtue is indeed its own reward, and that’s good. However, feeling righteous can soon enough turn into feeling self-righteous. Nothing feels better than virtue;

Of winners and losers

February 23, 2017

Our society tends to divide us up into winners and losers. Sadly, we don’t often reflect on how this affects our relationships with each other or what it means for us as Christians. What does it mean? In essence, that our relationships with each other are too charged with competition and jealousy because we are

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