Fr Ronald Rolheiser, Author at Catholic Herald

Fr Ronald Rolheiser

August 25, 2016

It’s funny when you can learn a lesson and catch a glimpse of the divine. Recently, in a grocery store, I witnessed the following incident. A young girl, probably around 16 years of age, along with two other girls her own age, came into the store. She picked up a grocery basket and began to

What exactly is a happy death?

August 18, 2016

In the Roman Catholic culture in which I grew up, we were taught to pray for a happy death. For many Catholics at the time, this was a standard petition within their daily prayer: “I pray for a happy death.” But how can one die happy? Isn’t the death-process itself excruciating? What about the pain

The healthy way to fear God

August 11, 2016

Unless you are already a full saint or a mystic, you will always live in some fear of death and the afterlife. That’s simply part of being human. But we can, and must, move beyond our fear of God. As a child, I lived with a lot of fear. I had a very active imagination

Overcoming our fear of hell

August 04, 2016

Hell is never a nasty surprise waiting for a basically happy person. Hell can only be the full flowering of a pride and selfishness that have, through a long time, twisted a heart so thoroughly that it considers happiness as unhappiness and has an arrogant disdain for happy people. If you are essentially warm of

Suicide and mental health

July 28, 2016

As young boy, I longed to be a professional athlete. But soon I had to accept the unwelcome fact that I simply wasn’t gifted with an athlete’s body. Speed, strength, coordination, instinct, vision – I got by in ordinary life with what I had been given of these, but I wasn’t physically robust enough to

Angels with sickles and God’s fury

July 21, 2016

There’s a haunting text in the Book of Revelation where poetic image, for all its beauty, can be dangerously misleading. The author writes: “So the angel swung his sickle over the earth and cut the earth’s vintage. He threw it into the great winepress of God’s fury.” A fierce angel cleansing the world! God in

Our deepest insecurity

July 14, 2016

Why don’t we live happier lives? Why are we forever caught up in frustrations, tensions, anger and resentments? The reasons, of course, are too many to name. Each day, as Jesus himself tells us, brings problems enough for the day. We’re unhappy for reasons too many to count. And yet it can be helpful to

Struggling with our grandiosity

July 07, 2016

We live in a world wherein most everything overstimulates our grandiosity, even as we are handed fewer and fewer tools to deal with that. Several years ago, Robert L Moore wrote a very significant book entitled Facing the Dragon. The dragon that most threatens us, he believes, is the dragon of our own grandiosity, that

My church, my country and me first!

June 30, 2016

“I am a citizen, not of Athens or Greece, but of the world.” Socrates wrote those words more than 2,400 years ago. Today, more than ever, these are words that we need to appropriate because, more and more, our world and we ourselves are sinking into some unhealthy forms of tribalism where we are concerned

Of guns and pacifism

June 23, 2016

The Gospels tell us that after King Herod died, an angel appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt, telling him: “Get up! Take the Child and His Mother and go to the land of Israel, for those seeking the Child’s life are now dead” (Matthew 2:19-20). The angel, it would seem, spoke prematurely. The

The struggle to love our neighbour

June 16, 2016

“The most damaging idolatry is not the golden calf but enmity against the other.” The renowned anthropologist René Girard wrote that, and its truth is not easily admitted. Most of us like to believe that we are mature and big-hearted, and that we do love our neighbours and are free of enmity towards others. But

On sensitivity and suffering

June 09, 2016

Daniel Berrigan, in one of his famous quips, once wrote: “Before you get serious about Jesus, first consider carefully how good you are going to look on wood!” In saying this, he was trying to highlight something that’s often radically misunderstood from almost every side: namely, how and why authentic religion brings suffering into our

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