Fr Ronald Rolheiser, Author at Catholic Herald

Fr Ronald Rolheiser

January 25, 2018

Recently I received a letter from a man who shared that he was still deeply haunted by a story he’d heard in primary school many years before. One of his religion teachers had read them a story about a priest who went to visit a childhood friend. While staying with his friend, the priest noticed

How can it all have a happy ending?

January 18, 2018

There’s a line in the writings of Julian of Norwich, the 14th-century mystic and perhaps the first theologian to write in English, which is endlessly quoted by preachers, poets and writers: “But all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” It’s her signature teaching. We all

A healthy fear of God

January 11, 2018

Why don’t we preach hellfire any more? That’s a question asked frequently today by a lot of sincere religious people who worry that too many churches, and too many priests and ministers, have gone soft on sin and are over-generous in speaking about God’s mercy. The belief here is that more people would come to

My top 10 books of the year

January 04, 2018

Taste is subjective. Keep that in mind as I share with you the 10 books that most touched me this past year. That isn’t necessarily a recommendation that you read them. They may leave you cold, or angry at me that I praised them. Be your own critic here – and one who isn’t afraid

The Christ Child of the Year

December 21, 2017

Every year Time magazine recognises someone as “Person of the Year”. The recognition isn’t necessarily an honour; it’s given to the person whom Time judges to have been the newsmaker of the year – for good or bad. This year, instead of choosing an individual to recognise as newsmaker of the year, it recognised instead

The real tragedy of sin

December 14, 2017

The real tragedy of sin is that often the one who is sinned against eventually becomes a sinner, inflicting on others what was first inflicted upon him or her. There’s something perverse within us whereby when we are sinned against we tend to take in the sin, complete with the sickness from which it emanated,

When keeping a secret is healthy

December 07, 2017

In all healthy people there’s a natural reticence about revealing too much of themselves and a concomitant need to keep certain things secret. Too often we judge this as an unhealthy shyness or, worse, as hiding something bad. But reticence and secrecy can be as much virtue as fault because, as the psychologist James Hillman

Playing fast and loose with the truth

November 29, 2017

It can be quite disheartening to watch the news these days. Our world is full of hatred, bigotry, racism, and over-stimulated greed and ego. The gap between the rich and poor is widening and random. Senseless violence is an everyday occurrence. One lives with hope, but without much optimism. Among all of this perhaps the

God is closer than we can imagine

November 23, 2017

There’s a growing body of literature today that chronicles the experience of people who had been clinically dead for a period of time (minutes or hours) and were medically resuscitated and brought back to life. Many of us, for example, are familiar with Dr Eben Alexander’s book Proof of Heaven: a Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the

The subtle threat to our decency

November 16, 2017

Jesus tells us that in the end we will be judged on how we dealt with the poor in our lives, but there are already dangers now, in this life, in not reaching out to the poor. Here’s how Bryan Stevenson, in his book Just Mercy, teases out that danger: I’ve come to believe that

Paralysis and helplessness as prayer

November 09, 2017

Several years ago I received an email that literally stopped my breath. A man who had been for many years an intellectual and faith mentor to me, whom I thoroughly trusted and with whom I had developed a life-giving friendship, had killed both his wife and himself in a murder-suicide. The news left me gasping

A plea for the soul

November 02, 2017

Recently on The Moth Radio Hour, a young woman shared the story of her break-up with her boyfriend, a young man for whom she had deep feelings. The problem was that she, a Mormon with a deep faith, struggled with the radical materialism of her boyfriend. For him, there were no souls: the physical world

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