Fr Ronald Rolheiser, Author at Catholic Herald

Fr Ronald Rolheiser

April 19, 2018

Today belief in God is often seen as naïvety. For many, believing in God is like believing in Santa Claus and the Easter bunny: nice, something for the kids, a warm nostalgia or a bitter memory, but not something that’s real, that stands up to hard scrutiny and indeed stands up to the dark doubts

When time stands still

April 12, 2018

The theory of relativity tells us that space and time are not what they appear to be. They’re relative, meaning that they don’t always function in the same way and they aren’t always experienced in the same way. Time can stand still. Or can it? This side of eternity, it would seem not. Ever since

Putting God on trial

April 05, 2018

In both our piety and our agnosticism we sometimes put God on trial, and whenever we do that, it is we who end up being judged. We see that in the Gospel accounts of the trial of Jesus, particularly in John’s Gospel. John’s Gospel, as we know, paints a portrait of Jesus from the point

Prayer is meant to keep us awake

March 29, 2018

Unless you somehow have a foot outside your culture, the culture will swallow you whole. The Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan wrote that, and it’s true too in this sense: unless you can drink in strength from a source outside yourself, your natural proclivities for paranoia, bitterness and hatred will invariably swallow you whole. The disciples

The ups and downs of faith

March 22, 2018

The Muslim poet Rumi suggested that we live with a deep secret that sometimes we know, then not, and then know again. That’s a good description of faith. Faith isn’t something you nail down and possess once and for all. It goes this way: sometimes you walk on water and sometimes you sink like a

The passing of a good shepherd

March 15, 2018

No community should botch its deaths. Last month a wonderful leader within the faith community in Canada died and it could profit us all more fully to receive his spirit. How do we do that? It can be helpful for us, I believe, to highlight those places where his life, his energy and particularly his

Our ache for earthly immortality

March 08, 2018

We share the world with more than seven-and-a-half billion people, and each of us has the irrepressible, innate sense that we are special and uniquely destined. This isn’t surprising since each one of us is indeed unique and special. But how does one feel special among seven-and-a-half billion others? We try to stand out. Generally

Celibacy revisited

March 01, 2018

Writing in the first person is always a risk, but the subject matter of this column is best done, I feel, through personal testimony. In a world where chastity and celibacy are seen as naïve and to be pitied, and where there’s a general scepticism that anyone is actually living them out, personal testimony is

Our most common sin

February 22, 2018

Classically, Christianity has listed seven sins as “deadly” sins, meaning that almost everything else we do which is not virtuous somehow takes its root in one these congenital propensities. These are the infamous seven: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth. In spiritual literature the first three – pride, greed and lust – get

Faith and superstition

February 15, 2018

The power of a subordinate clause; one nuance within a sentence and everything takes on a different meaning. That’s the case in a brilliant but provocative novel, The Ninth Hour, by Nina McDermott. She tells a story which, among other things, focuses on a group of nuns in Brooklyn who work with the poor. Times

How does God act in our world?

February 08, 2018

There’s an oddity in the Gospels that begs for an explanation: Jesus, it seems, doesn’t want people to know his true identity as the Christ, the Messiah. He keeps warning people not to reveal that he is the Messiah. Why? Some scholars refer to this as “the messianic secret”, suggesting that Jesus did not want

Overcoming divisions that divide

February 01, 2018

We live in a world of deep divisions. Everywhere we see polarisation, people bitterly divided from each other by ideology, politics, economic theory, moral beliefs and theology. We tend to use over-simplistic categories within which to understand these divisions: the left and the right opposing each other, liberals and conservatives at odds, pro-life vying with

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