In his Confessions, St Augustine describes how his conversion to Christianity involved two separate moments of grace, the first that convinced him intellectually that Christianity was correct, and the second that empowered him to live out what he believed. There were nearly nine years between these two conversions and it was during those nine years…
Ghandi’s favourite reading was the Sermon on the Mount, especially the Beatitudes. He was deeply impressed by the life of Jesus Christ but not by the lives of Christians. Last week our Gospel was about the mission of Jesus to restore the world to the reign of God. Today we start the Sermon on the…
One of the great products of the Second Vatican Council has been a renewed understanding of the common priesthood of the baptised. We are all called to exercise our baptismal priesthood through participation, “each according to his own vocation, in Christ’s mission as priest, prophet, and king”, the Catechism tells us. By virtue of this…
If people of faith are going to sustain Christian commitment in a world swirling with endless possibilities for re-invention they need to have had an authentic experience of God, writes Fr Michael Kirwan SJ The prominent Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner made an astonishing claim about how he saw the future of the Church and of…
Charlie Chaplin is one of the few silent film stars likely to be known well even by people who have never seen a silent film. The American comic, whose character ‘The Tramp’ was iconic in the silent era, unsurprisingly makes the Vatican list of 45 significant films. The film they chose is the last film…
In 360AD Athanasius of Alexandria – one of the great Doctors of the Church – published a biography simply titled Life of Anthony. In it, he told the story of an illiterate and holy man who out of devotion to God went out into the desert to put into practice Christ’s words to the rich…
Maria Morrow The word “fear” has such a negative connotation to us. We fear our kids getting hurt. We fear spiders. We fear failure. We fear a tragic and untimely death. In other words, we fear the things that we don’t like or want. And sometimes our fears stand in the way of our goals…
In a homily, Karl Rahner once commented that in the Beatitudes in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus makes a rather stunning statement. He says, “blessed are you who are now weeping, for you shall laugh”. Rahner suggests that Jesus is teaching that our final state of happiness in heaven will not just lift us out of our…
The voice of John the Baptist is now silenced behind prison walls. It is time for Jesus to begin his mission. He leaves his home and work in Nazareth and settles initially in Capernaum, a lakeside town not too far away. There he begins his preaching with a short but challenging message. “Repent, for the…
One of the most ancient problems in philosophy is the question of ‘the one and the many’, whether reality is ultimately a unity or a plurality and how these interrelate. We might ask the same question regarding the plurality of religious faiths, Churches, and forms of worship in our world. Is there some inherent oneness…
Fr Ronald Rolheiser
Ruadhán Jones