Fr Ron Rolheiser The Newman Centre of Faith and Reason, based in Dublin, is hosting their Annual Newman Lecture. In this occasion, they are welcoming Fr Ron Rolheiser, who will be speaking on ‘not our tribal deity’.
In a recent conversation with The Irish Catholic, the author shared that he will be reflecting on “how we must free up our concept of God from tribalism, nationalism, legalism, false fear, false piety, and sometimes excused expressions.”
Expanding on this, Fr Rolheiser explained, “We’re always creating a God in our image and likeness who can serve our interests. We’ve got ourselves caught in legalism – like the pharisees. Ideology plays into this one factor, but it’s not the only factor.” “Whatever you do, try not to make God look stupid because everything we do reflects on God,” he added.
Fr Rolheiser has observed throughout the years that “The world is just different. No Christian has ever lived like this before. We haven’t helped this generation find the forms to live the faith,” pointing out that “Faith isn’t too explicit anymore, but implicitly, underneath, there is faith, and we have to have new imagination that can help people articulate what they’re feeling and eventually moved them to Christ.”
What role could imagination have in Faith revival? Fr Rolheiser, mentioning the Canadian philosopher, Charles Taylor, points out that “he [Charles Taylor] would look at Ireland and say, ‘you’re not experiencing a crisis of faith, you’re experiencing a crisis of imagination’. Faith is taking different expressions, and we still haven’t been able to articulate that.” Fr Rolheiser continued, “We have a Christianity that has an incredible intellectual imagination. We have a wonderful theology, and we have libraries of books that can save two worlds, but we can’t get people to fall in love anymore with Jesus and with the Church. We don’t have to be afraid of Church renewal.”
Fr Rolheiser mentioned that the Church has been in this situation before, “if you go back to St Francis of Assisi, him and Clare. They refired the imagination of Christianity. Or later on, Dominic and Ignatius did this too. We need a new Francis, a new Clare. We need a new Dominic.”
Talking about the strengths of the Catholic Church the priest mentioned that “I can see Catholics dealing with somebody who comes to church, but we no longer know how to get somebody to come to church. The evangelicals light more fires under people, but they have trouble sustaining it. Whereas we [Catholic Church] can sustain it.”
Commenting on the recent synod and its role in Church renewal, Fr Rolheiser notes that “a lot of people are going to be disappointed with the synod. What did it accomplish? Pope Francis got people of all ideologies into a room to sit down and talk to each other. This is what it accomplished. Pragmatically, doesn’t seem like much. It was more about changing a spirit and bringing a kind of a more of a dialogical model into the Church rather than just straight hierarchy. But if people are going to look at just the results, they’re not going to see a lot of practical results.”
“The Church is going through a phase,” noted the priest. “We always need to never get down or lose hope. The Church has been in this place before. It didn’t die. We must live in hope. Hope isn’t optimism, but God’s promise that the Church isn’t going to die. God is still alive, and Christ is still rising from the dead. And the Church will rise as well,” Fr Rolheiser concluded.