Fr. Ron Rolheiser

Fr. Ron Rolheiser

Ronald Rolheiser, a Roman Catholic priest and member of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, is president of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Texas.

He is a community-builder, lecturer and writer. His books are popular throughout the English-speaking world and his weekly column is carried by more than seventy newspapers worldwide.

Fr. Rolheiser can be reached at his website, www.ronrolheiser.com.

We tend to be naïve about evil, at least as to what it looks like in everyday life.

We don’t know how to celebrate things as they’re meant to be celebrated.

A number of years ago I attended a funeral. The man to whom we were saying goodbye had enjoyed a full and rich life.

In his autobiography, Eric Clapton, the famed rock and blues artist, writes very candidly about his long struggle with an addiction to alcohol.

There’s a real difference between our achievements and our fruitfulness, between our successes and the actual good that we bring into the world.

There’s a famous billboard that hangs along a congested highway that reads: You aren’t stuck in traffic. You are traffic!

I don’t always find it easy to pray. Often I’m over-tired, distracted, caught-up in tasks, pressured by work, short on time, lacking the appetite for prayer or more strongly drawn to do something else.

The complexity of adulthood inevitably puts to death the naiveté of childhood. And this is true too of our faith.

Several years ago Hollywood made a movie, City of Angels , about an angel named Seth whose job it was to accompany the spirits of the recently deceased to the afterlife.

The mark of genuine contrition is not a sense of guilt, but a sense of sorrow and regret for having taken a wrong turn.