Fr Ronald Rolheiser, Author at Catholic Herald

Fr Ronald Rolheiser

November 17, 2016

Atheism is a parasite that feeds on bad religion. That’s why, in the end, atheistic critics are our friends. They hold our feet to the fire. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx, for example, submit that all religious experience is ultimately psychological projection. For them, the God we believe in and who undergirds our

The real presence of Christ

November 10, 2016

When I was a graduate student in Belgium, I was privileged one day to sit in on a conference given by Cardinal Godfried Danneels of Brussels. He was commenting on the Eucharist and our lack of understanding of its full richness when he highlighted this contrast: if you stood outside a Catholic church today as

On our resistance to love

November 03, 2016

There’s nothing simple about being a human being. We’re a mystery to ourselves and are often our own worst enemies. Our inner complexity befuddles us and, not infrequently, stymies us. Nowhere is this truer than in our struggle with love and intimacy. More than anything else, we hunger for intimacy, to be touched where we

Boredom: a fault within ourselves

October 27, 2016

In 2011, a book by a young writer, Bieke Vandekerckhove, won an award for spiritual book of the year in her native Belgium. Entitled The Taste of Silence, the book chronicles her own struggles after being diagnosed at age 19 with ALS, commonly called Lou Gehrig’s disease, a degenerative neurological condition that results in a

Don’t confuse Jesus with Hamlet

October 20, 2016

Thirty-four years ago when I launched this column, I would never have said this: restlessness is not something to be cultivated, no matter how romantic that might seem. Don’t get Jesus confused with Hamlet, peace with disquiet, depth with dissatisfaction or genuine happiness with the existential anxiety of the artist. Restlessness inside us does not

Prayer that refuses pious thoughts

October 13, 2016

Contemplative prayer, as it is classically defined and popularly practised, is subject today to considerable scepticism in a number of circles. For example, the method of prayer commonly called centring prayer, popularised by people such as Thomas Keating, Basil Bennington, John Main and Laurence Freeman, is viewed with suspicion by many people who identify it

God is not our own tribal deity

October 06, 2016

I was blessed to grow up in a very sheltered and safe environment. My childhood was lived inside a virtual cocoon. In the remote, rural, first-generation immigrant community I grew up in, we all knew each other, all went to the same church, all belonged to the same political party, were all white, all came

Living in sin and our ‘moral software’

September 29, 2016

While I was doing graduate studies in Belgium, I lived at the American College in Leuven. On the staff there at the time, in the housekeeping and maintenance department, was a wonderfully colourful woman whose energy brought oxygen into a room but whose history of marriage somewhat paralleled that of the Samaritan woman in John’s

God’s indulgences revisited

September 22, 2016

When Pope Francis launched the Holy Year of Mercy, he promised that Christians could gain a special indulgence during this year. That left a lot of present-day Catholics, and even more Protestants and Evangelicals, scratching their heads and asking some hard questions. Is Catholicism still dealing in indulgences? Didn’t we learn anything from Luther and

From paranoia to metanoia

September 15, 2016

Sometimes we’re a mystery to ourselves, or perhaps more accurately, sometimes we don’t realise how much paranoia we carry within ourselves. A lot of things tend to ruin our day. I went to a meeting recently and for most of it felt warm and friendly towards my colleagues, and positive about all that was happening.

Feeding off life’s sacred fire

September 08, 2016

‘See the wise and wicked ones / Who feed upon life’s sacred fire.” These are lines from Gordon Lightfoot’s song Don Quixote, and they highlight an important truth: both the wise and the wicked feed off the same energy. And it’s good energy, sacred energy, divine energy, irrespective of its use. The greedy and the

Searching for utopia, with limits

September 01, 2016

When I was a child there was a popular song whose chorus repeated this line: “Everyone is searching for utopia.” And we all are. Every one of us longs for a world without limits, for a life where nothing goes wrong, for a place where there’s no tension or frustration. But it never happens. There’s

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