Fr Ronald Rolheiser, Author at Catholic Herald

Fr Ronald Rolheiser

March 10, 2016

What most moves your heart? I was asked this question recently at a workshop. We were asked to respond to this question: when do you most naturally feel compassion in your heart? For me, the answer came easily. I am most moved when I see helplessness, when I see someone or something helpless to tend

Mourning our barrenness

March 03, 2016

Several years ago, while teaching a summer course at Seattle University, I had as one of my students a woman who, while happily married, was unable to conceive a child. She had no illusions about what this meant for her. It bothered her a great deal. She found Mother’s Day very difficult. Among other things,

God’s inexhaustibility

February 25, 2016

Many of us, I am sure, have been inspired by the film Of Gods and Men, which tells the story of a group of Trappist monks who, after making a painful decision not to flee from the violence in Algeria in the 1990s, are eventually martyred by Islamic extremists in 1996. Recently, I was much

Reading difficult Scripture passages

February 18, 2016

A colleague of mine shares this story. Recently, after he presided at a Eucharist, a woman from the congregation came up to him with this comment: “What a horrible Scripture reading today! If that’s the kind of God we’re worshipping, then I don’t want to go to heaven.” The reading for that day’s liturgy was

A shirt of flame

February 11, 2016

They say that the book you most need to read finds you when you most need to read it. I’ve had that experience many times, most recently with Heather King’s book, Shirt of Flame: A Year with St Thérèse of Lisieux. The title of the book is borrowed from TS Eliot’s Four Quartets, where he

The kiss of God on the soul

February 04, 2016

What is the real root of human loneliness? A flaw within our make-up? Inadequacy and sin? Or does Augustine’s famous line, “You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you,” say it all? Augustine’s adage, for all its merit, is not quite enough. We are infinite souls

On bowing and raising our heads

January 28, 2016

At the end of every Catholic liturgy there is an invitation given to the people to receive a blessing. That invitation is worded this way: “Bow your heads and pray for God’s blessing.” The idea behind that, obviously, is that a blessing can only truly be received in reverence, in humility, with head bowed, with

Forever being ahead of our souls

January 21, 2016

Sometimes nothing is a helpful as a good metaphor. In his book The God Instinct, Tom Stella shares the following story. A number of men who made their living as porters were hired one day to carry a huge load of supplies for a group on safari. Their loads were unusually heavy and the trek

Only in silence

January 14, 2016

The Belgian spiritual writer Bieke Vandekerckhove comes by her wisdom honestly. She didn’t learn what she shares from a book or even primarily from the good example of others. She learnt what she shares through the crucible of a unique suffering, being hit at the tender age of 19 with a terminal disease that promised

My top books of the year

January 07, 2016

Taste, as St Augustine said some 1,700 years ago, is subjective. That should be acknowledged upfront whenever someone recommends a reading list. In my case, I need to state too that I’m not a full-time critic. It’s not as if I’ve read 200 books this past year and these rose to the top. I read

Sex and culture

December 22, 2015

No generation in history, I suspect, has experienced as much change as we have in the past 60 years. That change is not just in the areas of science, technology, medicine, travel and communications, it is especially in the area of our social infrastructure, of our communal ethos. And perhaps nowhere is this change more

When the whole truth is too much

December 17, 2015

Some years ago I was challenged by a bishop regarding an article I’d written. We were talking in his office and the tone eventually got a little testy: “How can you write something like that?” he asked. “Because it’s true,” was my blunt reply. He already knew it was true, but now, realising that, he

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