Fr Ronald Rolheiser, Author at Catholic Herald

Fr Ronald Rolheiser

January 03, 2019

God, it seems, favours the powerless, the unnoticed, children, babies, outsiders, and refugees with no resources or place to go. That’s why Jesus was born outside the city, in a stable, unnoticed, outside all fanfare, away from all major media, and away from all the persons and events that were deemed important at the time,

The double message of Christmas

December 20, 2018

I’ve never been happy with some of my activist friends who send out Christmas cards with messages like: “May the Peace of Christ Disturb You!” Can’t we have one day a year to be happy and celebrate without having our already unhappy selves shaken with more guilt? Isn’t Christmas a time when we can enjoy

A different kind of bucket list

December 13, 2018

What’s still unfinished in your life? Well, there’s always a lot that’s unfinished in everyone’s life. Nothing is ever really finished. Our lives, it seems, are simply interrupted by our dying. Most of us don’t complete our lives; we just run out of time. So consciously or unconsciously, we make a bucket list of things

A lesson in a parking lot

December 06, 2018

Our natural instincts serve us well, up to a point. They’re self-protective and that’s healthy too, up to a point. Let me explain. Recently I was at a football game with a number of friends. We arrived at the match in two cars and parked in the stadium’s underground parking lot. Our tickets were in

Our lack of welcome

November 29, 2018

“Widows, orphans and strangers”: that’s code in Scripture for the three most vulnerable groups within a society at any given time. And both the great Jewish prophets and Jesus himself assure us that ultimately we will be judged by how we treated these while we were alive. It’s interesting to look at any given book

Where piety and critical thinking meet

November 22, 2018

I live on both sides of a border. Not a geographical one, but one which is often a dividing line between two groups. I was raised a conservative Catholic, and conservative in most other things as well. Although my dad worked politically for the Liberal Party, almost everything about my upbringing was conservative, particularly with

When is our life fulfilled?

November 15, 2018

When is our life fulfilled? At what point in our lives do we say, “That’s it! That’s the climax! Nothing I can do from now on will outdo this. I’ve given what I have to give”? When can we say this? After we’ve reached the peak of our physical health and strength? After giving birth

A right way of dying

November 08, 2018

‘I do not want to die from some medical condition; I want to die from death.” Ivan Illich wrote that. What’s meant here? Don’t we all die from death? Of course, in reality that’s true. But in our idea of things, most often, we die from a medical condition or from bad luck through cancer,

Faith and levity

November 01, 2018

Shusaku Endo, the Japanese author of the classic novel Silence (upon which Martin Scorsese based his movie) was a Catholic who didn’t always find his native land, Japan, sympathetic to his faith. He was misunderstood but kept his balance and good heart by placing a high value on levity. It was his way of integrating

Beyond criticism and anger

October 25, 2018

I attended a symposium recently where the keynote speaker was a man exactly my age. Since we had lived through the same cultural and religious changes in our lives, I empathised with much of what he said and with how he felt about things. And in his assessment of both the state of affairs in

Suicide and the soul

October 18, 2018

More than 50 years ago, the American psychologist James Hillman wrote a book entitled Suicide and the Soul. It was intended for therapists and he knew it would not receive an easy reception either there or elsewhere. There were reasons for that. He frankly admitted that some of the things he proposed in the book

The search for an ‘indubitable’

October 11, 2018

In a book, 12 Rules for Life – An Antidote to Chaos, that is justifiably making waves in many circles today, Jordan Peterson shares his journey towards truth and meaning. Here is that story: At one point in his life, while still young and finding his own path, Peterson reached a stage where he felt

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